The Middle Ground of the NDE R&D Spectrum

Our keynote talk today has several objectives: First, we want to call attention, as some of us have before, to the interdisciplinary nature of NDE science and technology and some approaches for fostering R&D in such a situation. Next, we want to describe the objective of the DARPA, Air Force (and now Navy) core program for developing a science base for NDE and how it has evolved during the past two years. Some changes have indeed taken place; we feel that they were both necessary and evolutionary. Many of you are probably familiar with these changes by now but there may be some residual concerns or questions in your minds. Since I was the initiating influence behind most of them, it is appropriate for you to hear me say what they are and what they aren’t, and to have an opportunity to question us. Finally and most importantly, we want to enlist your participation in the difficult task of identifying exploratory development programs—and we will try to define this term—which will benefit from the growing science base that all of us are helping to develop. We hope to stimulate the interaction between people such as you and the consumers of the evolving NDE technology in order to identify reduction-to-practice possibilities that should be pursued