Across just about all industries that have tanks, piping upon supports or piping entering the ground, clients are faced with inspection challenges and specific concerns on how to inspect the critical areas of these three asset components.
Friction stir weld (FSW) inspections in aerospace manufacturing are challenging for ultrasound technicians not necessarily because they require specialized computations or complex techniques but because scanning with conventional probe setups can be so time consuming.
As nondestructive examination (NDE) continues to evolve as an inspection discipline, so the technologies of NDE evolve to meet new challenges in terms of materials and material geometries to be inspected.
Portable phased array ultrasonic testing systems hit the market nearly 20 years ago, and today the latest generation of these tools delivers better amplitude resolution, faster data acquisition rates, and advanced data analysis in a single easy-to-handle package.
Olympus announced the addition of a motorized steerable scanner to its line of solutions for ultrasonic and phased array testing. The field-tested, remote-controlled SteerROVER™ scanner is the most ad-vanced and versatile motorized scanner offered by Olympus.
On April 20, three days after a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 experienced an engine failure due to a fractured fan blade, resulting in the death of a passenger, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency airworthiness directive that requires operators of CFM56-7B engines with more than 30,000 flight cycles to perform a one-time ultrasonic inspection of all 24 fan blades to detect cracking.