Student-built metal inert-gas (MIG) welding cells in engineering education are routinely used to train radiographic interpretation and joint-quality assessment, yet the detection limits of those cells under realistic shielding-gas flow drift remain uncharacterised. The central problem is that the porosity fraction at which a student-built cell can reliably distinguish a defective from a sound joint is not a fixed property of the radiographic apparatus but a function of gas-flow drift, which alters both the size distribution and the spatial clustering of pores. A reliability model is developed that links gas-flow deviation to the probability of detection at a stated confidence level, and the model is calibrated against radiographic measurements on seeded specimens. The analysis yields detection-limit curves that shift systematically with flow drift, and it identifies the flow-drift magnitude beyond which the cell's detection capability falls below the threshold required for instructional joint-strength certification. The contribution is a bounded, reproducible procedure for stating what a student-built MIG cell can and cannot certify, together with the gas-flow control tolerance that the procedure implies.
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Gueddi et al. (2026) studied this question.
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