Non-destructive testing, in particular for pipes during manufacture or in the finished state

A device forming an operating tool for non-destructive testing during or at an end of production of iron and steel pipes or other elongated products, the operating tool being intended to extract information concerning possible defects in the pipe from feedback signals that are captured following selective excitation of ultrasound transducers according to a selected time rule, the transducers forming a transducer arrangement with a selected geometry, and are mounted in ultrasound coupling with the pipe via an intermediary of a liquid medium, with relative rotation/translation movement between the pipe and the transducer arrangement, said operating tool comprising:

• a converter capable of selectively isolating a digital representation of possible echoes in designated time windows as a function of the relative rotation/translation movement and extracting images from the digital representation of possible defects in the pipe;
• a filter capable of determining, in the images, presumed defect zones as well as properties of each presumed defect;
• a combiner arranged to prepare digital inputs for a neural circuit from an extract of the images corresponding to a presumed defect zone, properties of the presumed defect in the same zone coming from the filter, and contextual data;
• at least one neural circuit arrangement that receives the inputs from the combiner, wherein said neural arrangement comprises a first neural circuit suitable for evaluating a nature of a defect among a number of predefined classes, and a second neural circuit suitable for evaluating a seriousness of a defect, wherein the first and second neural circuits have inputs that differ by an input of a number of maxima in a vicinity for the first neural circuit, and an input of an echo width for the second neural circuit;
• a digital decision and alarm stage, operating on a basis of an output from the neural circuit arrangement, and
• a sorting and marking robot, arranged to separate and mark pipes that have been deemed not to conform by the decision and alarm digital stage.