Inspection by e-mail: a dream of the future?

John, a Level 3 Supervisor, was in his office completing a report on his PC, when the display changed to show the screen presentation of one of the new ultrasonic systems they had recently purchased. One of his Operator’s must have a problem and was contacting him via the Internet using a mobile phone connection. This allowed John to view the results and remotely control the field unit.

On the new fabrication site where they were working, they had been under pressure to replace the on-site radiography with a non-hazardous system, which could be used alongside the welders, so they had chosen a multifunction ultrasonic system.

John’s screen showed the area scanned along a circumferential butt weld and top and end views of the weld, indicating an intermittent defect. At the bottom of the screen was an e-mail message from one of his operator’s, expressing concern over the defect and asking for guidance.

John knew that his operator would perform the examination according to the procedures and suspected that the defect was, in fact, continuous. He accessed the settings of the remote flaw detector and after ensuring everything was correct, increased the gain.He then e-mailed from the scan screen a message to his operator to rescan the area at the higher gain.

A few moments later the new image was forming on his screen confirming the defect was indeed continuous. John utilised the sizing cursors to obtain a quick estimate of the defect size and forwarded both scans by e-mail to the Consultant Engineer for the project. The Engineer decided that the defect was acceptable but asked for a TOFD fingerprint to be taken so any future growth could be monitored. This was e-mailed to the site operator who performed the scan with the same instrument and stored all the results for his final report.

A dream world? Not at all! The ISONIC 2001 workstation available from Sonotron NDT was shown accessing a remote PC via a mobile phone and receiving text messages and instrument setting changes by return at the 15th WCNDT exhibition.

The ISONIC 2001 is an area scanning system with an onboard full function ultrasonic flaw detector and does not require a mechanical scanner. It can record the probe position for any type of inspection instrument and record the effective coverage of any scan.

The ISONIC 2001 is an area scanning system with an onboard full function ultrasonic flaw detector and does not require a mechanical scanner. It can record the probe position for any type of inspection instrument and record the effective coverage of any scan.