Inexpensive spatial position system for the improvement of manual ultrasound NDT

Manual Ultrasonic Non Destructive Testing (MUT) is vital in safety critical industries such as aerospace, chemical processing and power generation and is also well-known for its higher attainable flaw sensitivity than all other volumetric Non Destructive Testing systems. MUT generally provides cost-effective and high sensitivity to flaw detection whenever short distances and/or practical access to pieces under inspection are involved. But the probability of defect detection by MUT is reduced by the influence of human factors. Therefore the aim is to improve the reliability of manual ultrasonic testing by developing an ICT enabled system based on an inexpensive spatial positioning system that during inspection will enable intelligent monitoring and performance evaluation of the human inspector, comparing the data collected from the spatial positioning system and NDT sensors against the requirements of the inspection procedure. This paper describes the development of an inexpensive wireless system comprising of an optical spatial positioning system and inertial measurement unit (IMU) that relates the 3D location of an NDT probe carried by an inspector to a computer aided drawing (CAD) representation of the test structure in a MATLAB environment and also creates three dimensional visualisation of the flaws in that test structure