Auto-centering of seamless pipe for NDT using Three Guide Roller FLD Technique

Abstract

Auto-centering of shaft is the key operation in the industry. This paper deals with actual autocentering requirement of the seamless pipe manufacturing industry. Seamless pipe is to be feed for the non destructive testing(NDT) but there were few problems problems such as jamming of upper roller, wearing of roller material. Sometimes offsetting of roller axis is also seen. This causes incoming pipe to struck in between. Many times manual interference is required to ensure axis alignment. Bearing failure also occurs and ultimately the proper inspection of pipe in ultrasonic setup and eddy current test setup cannot be done. Hence development of auto-centering mechanism comes in the picture. Along with the development of mechanism vibration level should be less. Free layer damping treatment is used to avoid vibrations of rollers and to reduce wear of the rollers. Tri-roller design along with FLD patches is suggested in this paper to improve the life of machine. Vibration testing is done with NI-LabView software to measure damping loss factor with MATLAB code