The iNSIde View

With the advances in CT, comes the opportunity to perform very high-speed CT scans of some products. The CT scan can quickly provide a 3D view of all indications as well as their location within a product. With a 3D data set, automatic software routines can be applied with true 3D acceptance criteria applied to assisted and automatic defect recognition (ADR) routines.

Standard cone beam scanning is sufficient for many applications, but what about the applications where you cannot fit the part in a single detectors view? Physical size of a sample can be a limitation when trying to achieve a given resolution, or you may be dealing with artifact issues. All of these limitations are the reason that NSI has developed advanced scanning styles to overcome issues you may run into when a challenging application comes in.Vortex scanning is a commonly used scanning style by our NSI experts when a sample is very tall in one direction, such as a baseball bat. When looking for measurement…

My name is Ross Johnson and I am the “New Guy” to NDT. Now when I say “new” I mean BRAND NEW. After college I started a woodworking business and for a few years I built everything and anything from skateboards to banjo necks. I had jobs in machine shops running Bridgeport’s and lathes and then I moved into Product Development. My time in Quality Control was always limited to comparators, CMM and gages. And because there were never any requirements for non-destructive testing in our industry, I never learned about the different types of NDT. My first experience with X-ray was the X-ray I had of my broken pinky…

When performing Digital Radiography and Computed Tomography, a common issue all of us deal with is the balancing of exposure time and signal to noise ratio (SNR). SNR simply compares the level of the desired signal to the level of the undesirable background noise within an image. SNR is therefore the result of dividing the average (mean) signal by the variation (standard deviation)

As aerospace suppliers enter into the world of digital radiography, there may be some obstacles with customer approvals. Receiving customer approvals for production using digital X-ray can be easier when following this recommended path. The scenario of transitioning from film based radiography to a digital radiography system has been recently seen as the chicken or the egg. Which one came first? Since the mid 2000’s suppliers have questioned investing in capital equipment. How can the supplier invest in capital equipment unless an…

When I first began working at NSI in 1998, I clearly remember one of my first visits to a testing laboratory in Wisconsin. That particular company was interested in converting their X-ray film systems to digital detector technology-based systems. Nearly all of their radiography work involved the inspection of castings for voids and shrink, making the utilization of a digital detector very practical with the opportunity to show a great savings in a short term. At the time, the technology had just been released and I really knew very little about digital technology in general; my father-in-law had just purchased a digital…