Low-cost, Position Indicator for Nondestructive Inspection C-Scanning Navy STTR FY2005 Sol No.: Navy STTR FY2005 Topic No.: N05-T004 Topic Title: Low-cost, Position Indicator for Nondestructive Inspection C-Scanning Proposal No.: N054-004-0412 Firm: VM Solutions, Inc., dba VM Products, Inc. P.O. Box 44926 Tacoma, Washington 98444-0926 Contact: David Brown Phone: (253) 841-2939 Web Site: www.vmproducts.net Abstract: The Navy's nondestructive inspection mainly uses portable instruments with hand held ultrasonic or eddy current probes. The inspector makes the calls based on the data displayed on the instrument in real time without the aid of an image. This makes it difficult to distinguish between flaws and normal substructures and to quantify the size, shape and severity of the flaws. The problem can be greatly alleviated if a C-scan image of the inspection area is generated using the inspection data. Although most of the portable NDT instruments used by the Navy have either serial or analog output to make the data available, mechanical scanners are too cumbersome, expensive and complicated for field use on complex structures. An effective solution is to track the position of hand held probes using remote sensors and combine both the position and NDT data on a laptop computer C-scan display. There are many benefits of such a system. The inspector performance improves because he has access to the inspection data in image form, yet he can continue to inspect areas that would be difficult to reach using most scanners. All the benefits of manual inspection are retained, especially the ability to concentrate on critical areas. Benefits: Three support letters included with the proposal show that the new technology to be developed in this project is seen as a much-needed solution to a long term problem and that there will be a demand for its adoption by military depots, the airlines, OEMs in the aircraft industry and by government and other research laboratories. This system would be commercialized in two forms. The first would be an instrument which attached to an existing ET or UT instrument and probe and transmitted position and test data to a laptop computer via an Ethernet link for data display and analysis. The second would include integration of this system into VM Products Eddy Current and Bond Test instruments to be available to customers as an additional option. Within these two forms, a low cost two-dimensional encoder, and a higher cost three-dimensional option for encoding complex structures will be available. The market demand for this system will be driven by the need for additional display and analysis capability for area scans of aircraft components. This system would convert existing, relatively simple and inexpensive equipment to acquire and display data in complex, mapped formats. By filling in the display with data in a "paintbrush" fashion, complete test coverage of a part will be ensured. Various data analysis capabilities may easily be added to this system for later analysis as well as reporting. The system provides data storage of large data sets and will enable archiving of data maps of components for results data basing and for comparison to future test data. The demand for data basing of test data is expected to grow throughout the NDE industry over the next several years. Return