Non-destructive testing and evaluation for structural integrity

Reliable performance of a component or structure depends on pre-service quality of the component and in-service degradation of the component under operating conditions. The role of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) in ensuring pre-service quality and also monitoring in-service degradation to avoid premature failure of the components/structures is ever increasing. There are many NDE techniques based on various physical principles. The end objective of NDE is detection and characterisation of anomalies such as defects, stresses and microstructural degradations in materials. This is accomplished by establishing correlation between a nondestructively measured physical/derived parameter and quantitative information on defects/stresses/microstructures. The NDE information together with design parameters are taken into consideration for evaluation of integrity and life assessment of the components/structures. In this paper, a brief description of the physical concepts of NDE methods and the physical/derived parameters that are used for assessing defects, stresses and microstructures are given. A few case studies highlighting the importance of non-destructive testing and evaluation for structural integrity assessment are also discussed based on the investigations carried out at the authors' laboratory. Emerging concepts like intelligent processing of materials, expert systems, neural networks, use of multisensors with fusion of data and exploitation of signal analysis and imaging approaches are also addressed in this paper