The Dakota DFX-7 is both, an ultrasonic flaw detector, as well as an ultrasonic A/B Scan thickness scope, in a single unit. Thickness gauge are specifically setup to very accurately measure thickness, locate pits, flaws and blind surface corrosion. All the linearity tables, correction curves for various types of longitudinal transducers and features are built with dimensional thickness as its primary focus. Flaw detectors are designed to detect, size, position, and differentiate between flaw types in various materials and welded joints. A flaw detector must be fast, in terms of its sample and screen refresh rate, as inspectors are generally scanning the surface of a part or test specimen at a relatively high speed, rather than looking for the thickness at a specific point or location. While flaw detectors can also measure material thickness with reasonable accuracy, they are not designed with precision thickness as their primary focus. The DFX-7 combines the two types of gauges into one powerful and full featured instrument, that’s equipped with a number of comprehensive toolkits to provide the user the arsenal necessary to address a number of common field applications.
The DFX-7 has the ability to simultaneously measure coatings and material thicknesses while maintaining the ability to locate pits, flaws and defects in the material. Based on the same operating principles as SONAR, the DFX-7 is capable of measuring the thickness of various materials with accuracy as high as ± 0.001 inches, or ± 0.01 millimeters. The principle advantage of ultrasonic measurement over traditional methods is that ultrasonic measurements can be performed with access to only one side of the material being measured.
There are two versions of the DFX-7 series: DFX-7 and DFX-7+. The DFX-7 is a wide band only gauge, which includes a single wide band filter with a range of 1.8MHz to 19MHz. The DFX-7+ includes the same wide band filter, but also includes a few narrow band filter options at 2MHz, 5MHz and 10MHz. The wide band option is responsive to all signals within the given frequency range. However, narrow band filters eliminate signals outside of the target filter frequency, and focus on the output of the transducer at the specified frequency.