Steel Plate Stiffener Locator 1

[Ussuri]

Does anyone know of a tool which can be used to find the location of stiffeners under various thickness of plate? Something a little more scientific that the good old hammer?

 

[Ron]

An ultrasonic scan of the plate.

 

[Ron]

Maybe I should expand on that a bit....

You can scan the plate surface with a variety of ultrasonic devices (thickness gage, flaw detector, B-scan device, etc.)

Depending on how the stiffeners were fastened to the plate (assuming fillet welds), if you're careful you'll be able to spot an abrupt change in thickness, indicating the weld. If you are lucky and the stiffeners were attached with complete penetration welds, then you'll see the plate thickness plus the depth of the stiffener.

A scanning device that takes multiple field readings will show anomalies at the attachment point, thus indicating the location of the stiffener.

 

[Ussuri]

Ron

Thanks for that. Are you aware of any particular brands/makes that are suitable for use in the field and are reputable? The application I am looking at is identifying stiffener locations in/on vessel structures and tanks.

Normally a hammer is good enough, but I recently had a situation where we couldn't find the stiffener marked on a drawing with just a hammer. Which got me thinking, hence the original post.

 

[Ron]

Ussuri...the least expensive way to get into this is by using an ultrasonic thickness gage. Better ones are made by Krautkramer-Branson.

You can get others ranging in cost from $1500 (US) to $10,000 (US).