A collaborative research project funded by the EC under the BRITE-EURAM II "Industrial and Materials Technologies" Programme.

Partners:- Mitsui Babcock Energy Ltd. (UK)
Institut de Soudure (FR)
Isotopen Technik Dr. Sauerwein GmBH (GER)
Nordon & CIE (FR)
The University of Surrey (UK)

A four year 1.7 million ECU international collaborative project which is 50% funded by the Commission of the European Communities under the BRITE-EURAM II program is being carried out by a consortium of the five partner organisations listed above. The start date of the project was June 1993, with completion scheduled for June 1997.

Introduction

The basic approach to the inspection and repair procedure for welding has hardly changed in the last 30 years. The normal practice has continued to be to inspect the weld only after welding is complete. Thus by the time a defect is detected considerable time and money has been spent on completing the welding of a rejectable component. A large number of additional weld runs have generally been deposited over the defect increasing cost of repair and decreasing the quality of the component since the repair will be larger. The opportunity to use process control to reduce the number of defects has also been lost.

There would be major cost and programme advantages for a wide range of industries if nondestructive testing (NDT) was performed during welding as an on-line operation. Rejectable welds could be identified as such before wasting time and money completing the weld, repairs could be performed more quickly and economically if performed before further weld build up, and the detection of a high incidence of flas during welding would enable the process parameters to be appropiately adjusted prior to completion of a production run.

The project

Only recently have technological adavnces meant that it should now be possible to perform NDT during welding, with all the associated economic and programme adavantages. This project will utilise the state of the art in NDT, and image and signal processing technologies to determine the best methods for on-line inspection of welding. The specific aims of the project are :- (1) to exploit recent developments in real time radioscopy, ultrasonics and image and signal processing by adapting them for on-line flaw detection during welding. (2) to quantify the capabilities achieveable by these methods. (3) to provide the basis for fully developed systems for flaw detection during welding. Information on the role of each partner within the project, along with relevant contact addresses, can be obtained by clicking on the partner list at the top of this web page.

Further information :-

For further information on this work please contact either the project coordinator:-

Dr. Barrie Shepherd,
Mitsui Babcock Energy Ltd.,
Technology Centre,
High Street, Renfrew,
PA4 8UW. Scotland.
tel: 44 (0)141 8862201
fax: 44 (0)141 8853370

or, for the University of Surrey, and for comments on this page, :-

Shaun Lawson

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Last change: April 2000