South Texas Chapter

Of

American Society Nondestructive Testing

Yearbook (2017 – 2018)

19 people attended meeting.

September 20, 2017 meeting was held at OEM, Inc with tour of the facility. Brian Edens gave tour of the manufacturing facility, highlighting what they do to manufacture (from scratch) a variety of NDE/NDT products including high speed EMI pipe inspection systems. On display was a fully automated mill class EMI system capable of handling pipe as long as 45 ft. in length, pipe weight up to 4200 lbs. at an inspection rate of 30 inches/sec.

Meeting Night

BOD Meeting

Meeting held for John Jay STEM Students with an Introduction of Nondestructive Evaluation. A presentation with demonstration of some Nondestructive Testing techniques was performed for the students.

Meeting Night

BOD Meeting

13 people attended meeting.

Storage tank inspection is performed commercially using multiple techniques.  One example is inspection of the inner vessel bottoms of double-shelled storage tanks (DSTs) located at the Hanford site.  These large tanks, built as early as the 1960s, are used to store hazardous nuclear waste.  The tank bottoms were not inspected originally because access was not possible given the vessel contents.  A leak that originated from the inner tank bottom was recently detected in one of the oldest DSTs, creating a need to develop new inspection approaches.  This paper describes a guided wave inspection solution with the sensor located on the inner vessel sidewall.  The electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) used propagates waves from the sidewall to the tank bottom; data is collected at multiple locations and combined to create an image of the bottom condition. 

Meeting Night

BOD Meeting

Sonatest consists of a group of passionate people who are proud of their pioneering heritage in NDT ultrasonic solutions making the world a safer place. As a leading NDT equipment manufacturer for the past 60 years, Sonatest is recognized for delivering quality, rugged and portable products. Specializing in conventional and phased array ultrasonic NDT technologies, Sonatest provides solutions to a number of industries including transportation, oil and gas, aerospace, power generation and civil engineering. Based on their extensive experience, Sonatest continues to put smart design and technological innovations at the center of all their products to offer powerful solutions that are easy to use and will withstand the harshest of NDT environments. They are also committed to support their customers in a growing global market from offices in the UK, Canada and USA, multiple fully equipped and trained service centers as well as an extended network of 100 partners over 5 continents.

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BOD Meeting

BOD Meetings only this month

BOD Meeting

BOD Meeting

The NDT industry is facing a void of qualified technicians and inspectors as most of the legacy service providers enter retirement. This problem is well known yet solutions have been limited in scope, too expensive, or isolated to a specific company, industry or region. Based on new research conducted on behalf of the American Aerospace Technical Academy (AATA), this presentation provides specific details on the looming talent void and discusses innovative techniques that the AATA is implementing to solve the problem. The new research provides a unique perspective on the global market for service providers, with insight on how many new technicians and inspectors will be needed over the next decade.  The scope of the research includes analysis by industry (aerospace, automotive, construction, defense, infrastructure, laboratories, oil and gas, shipbuilding, steel and foundry, power, others), individuals employed (full-time, contractors), compensation by certification (Level I, Level II, Level III, API Inspector, CWI Inspector), rate of retirement, individuals in training, forecast of future demand for certified technicians.

John A. Stewart

Increasing demands for efficiency in the gas power generation industry show that new methods for controlling capital costs are needed. PW Power Systems uses a nondestructive testing (NDT) methodology to validate refurbishing of gas turbine blades, extending their service life. NDT allows examination of the internal channels and hollows within the turbine blades to ensure that they conform to mandated safety specifications. Manually operated ultrasound sensors are used, but they are slow and require expensive skilled labor to operate. UEG developed an automated NDT station to analyze PW’s refurbished turbine blades. The station uses a robotic arm to operate an ultrasound sensor with little skill required on behalf of the operator. The operator need only load blades into a testing tank and issue commands by a simple touch-screen interface. Sensor results are analyzed and displayed using a traditional A-scan oscilloscope output. The NDT station demonstrated the ability to find the depth of cooling channels within turbine blades. Future iterations of the prototype could scale the automated process up to meet PW’s needs by improving reliability of measurement, reducing setup and cycle times, and further increasing automation.

Scott Heskew, Dillion Johnson, & Miguel Torres

Meeting Night

The reliability of inspection procedures is very important in understanding the quality of inspections conducted in many industries such as nuclear, aerospace, and space. The inspection reliability can be statistically validated using the Probability of Detection (POD) process. Accomplishing the POD can be expensive because of the requirement for a large number of test samples to demonstrate the inspection capability. IHI Southwest Technologies, Inc wanted to optimize the process and cost of performing a POD validation process by modeling the number of defects and the defect sizes. Eclipse Scientific developed the Status 5 POD software to model POD performance. The Status 5 POD Software was purchased by ISwT and used to investigate the number of samples, the defects and defect sizes in the samples and the number of operators needed. ISwT has a project that requires some 90/95 POD validations as well as a POD level called an Intermediate Rigor POD. During this presentation, the Status 5 software will be discussed and examples presented to illustrate how to obtain both 90/95 POD as well as the intermediate rigor POD.

Glenn Light

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BOD Meeting

Meeting Night