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PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020

Surface Crack and Universal Total Inspection and NDT Surface Examination

Awarded: NOK 89,999

Across many industrial sectors, there is increasing awareness of the need to inspect industrial artifacts and infrastructure, due to aging in service or lack of complete quality control at the point of manufacture. Hence, increasing attention is being paid to developing NDT technology which enables unskilled operators to inspect and diagnose aging structures or defective products quickly and accurately. To date, vision systems to detect flaws such as porosity and surface cracks has been highly difficult to accomplish and most of the vision systems themselves are usually complex systems consisting of expensive and bulky hardware and software. The cost of the vision system, the practical implementation difficulty of the vision system into industrial environment, and the image processing efficiency always bring up some challenges that greatly limit their applications. The costs of commercially available systems are between UDS20,000 and USD150,000 while their applicability is limited by the material type and accessibility of the inspection area. We propose to develop a completely non-contact, low-cost inspection vision system capable of fully automatic and very rapid surface-crack detection. This will be achieved via surface inspection techniques using a travelling dot scanning system. An example of the effectiveness of the technique in revealing rapidly hidden surface features, is shown below where cracks and surface porosity are clearly visible. This scan took less than a second to acquire and required no special prior preparation of the surface beforehand. The key advantages to this system as compared to SoA are that: It can be used on any material: ferrous and non-ferrous metals, polymers, concrete, etc; Completely non-contact and the speed of operation is literally thousands of times faster than existing techniques; Surface requires no special preparation; Lightweight, hand held, extremely portable; Spatial resolution of cracks is down to tens of microns.

Funding scheme:

PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020