ALMELO, THE NETHERLANDS-PANalytical, supplier of analytical instrumentation and software for X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), is celebrating five years of growth and development achieved since its launch in September 2002.

The 2008 NDTMA annual conference is being held at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, February 12 to 14, 2008.

Readers are invited to submit an abstract for the Materials Science & Technology 2008 (MS&T ’08) Conference and Exhibition, October 5 through 9, 2008, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh.

NEW YORK-Bulbtronics Inc., international distributor of bulbs, batteries and related lighting products, appoints John M. Dahdouh as vice president of a newly created subsidiary designed to serve the Latin American specialty lighting market.

ROCHESTER, NY-Carestream Health Inc. announces that Michael R. Holloway has been appointed area sales manager, Southeastern region, for the company’s Nondestructive Testing (NDT) Solutions Group.

TROY, MI-Test Equipment Distributors (TED), a supplier of nondestructive testing equipment and supplies nationwide, announces the acquisition of the supplies and accessories business unit of Universal NDT (Upland, CA).

MAPLE GROVE, MN- Carl Zeiss celebrated the grand opening of its North American Computed Tomography Technology Center located in Brighton, MI.

At ibg NDT, a new eddy current instrument can detect multiple types of surface flaws simultaneously with no resolution loss for any of the types. Bill Buschur, general manager of ibg NDT Systems Corp. (Farmington Hills, MI), likened it to radio: listeners can clearly hear only one station at a time-or in the case of eddy current, only one flaw type at a time-because multiple radios tuned to multiple stations produce only unintelligible noise.

Since writing my last note for October, I have been traveling yet again, to Spain, Morocco and, of course, the Midwest. I flew into Detroit three times since writing that column, attending the MS&T show at the end of September, a Powertrain Engineering and Manufacturing Alliance (PEMA) press conference in October, and finished the year with a computed tomography lab open house in December.

Eddy current inspection is a versatile nondestructive testing technique. It allows accurate measurement and evaluation of the conductivity and, therefore, the chemistry, hardness and geometry of any electrically conductive material that is brought into the proximity of a coil of wire.