Robotic non-destructive testing

Reliable Non Destructive Testing (NDT) is vital to the integrity and performance management of capital assets in safety critical industries such as aerospace, transportation, pipelines, petro-chemical processing, and power generation.The NDT system is required to be capable of finding and characterizing component and structural defects to a high probability of detection thereby decreasing the probability of failure.Advances in engineering design and new materials such as composites have resulted in components and structures with complex geometries that need to be inspected with more robust NDT techniques.Radiography and ultrasonic NDT have become established as the most flexible methods being applicable to metals and non metals.Advanced radiography systems are very expensive and have to be operated in shielded bays but they provide the best NDT with X-ray Computed Tomography producing high-resolution 3D images of samples that can be viewed from any angle, sliced in any direction, measured and even animated in a virtual workspace.This enables detailed analysis of the internal structure of a wide range of components.Manual Ultrasonic Testing (0.5MHz -50MHz) is much cheaper and is widely used for inspection of most materials and especially of composite structures.It enables the inspection of critical areas that would otherwise be inaccessible and is used extensively to locate tiny cracks that would are undetectable by other methods.It is subject to the influence of 'human factors' and it is now widely recognised that despite intrinsic sensitivity advantages over other competing technologies it is not sufficiently reliable to assure the safety and integrity of components of complex geometry.