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Reconstructions of test shapes by ultrasonic tomography.

RAPID GROWTH AND ACCEPTANCE OF NONDESTRUCTIVE TESTING

Increased Complexity of Modern Machinery
Consider the present-day automobile. First, the manual choke became obsolete. The old rod from the dashboard to a butterfly valve in the carburetor has been replaced by more reliable and efficient metered fuel injection. The mechanically connected brake pedal and brake shoe have given way to hydraulic and antilock braking systems. The old manual windshield wipers are now powered by vacuum or electricity and complicated by washer jets and variable timers. Today's components include complex ventilation, heating, defrosting and air conditioning systems, power seats, power actuated windows and sun roofs, expanded electronics, emission controls, cruise controls, stereo equipment, digital gaging and automatic transmissions. The automobile industry, while carrying design complexity to great lengths, has also tremendously raised component reliability. Otherwise, most people would never dare to take their car from the garage for fear of serious failure.
As an even more startling example of component reliability arithmetic, consider computers. They require complex microprocessors, chips, resistors, wire connections, counters and other parts whose functioning demands operational reliability in each component. The automobile and the electronic instrument industries are examples of complexity that could never have been achieved without parallel advances in nondestructive testing.
Increased Demand on Machines
Within a lifetime, average speeds of railway passenger and freight trains have doubled. The speed of commercial air transport has quintupled. Transonic speeds for rocket powered missiles and for piloted aircraft are common. Automobile, bus and truck speeds have increased and their engines turn twice as fast. Elevators in tall buildings are fully automatic and much faster, with speeds limited only by the comfort of the passengers. The stress applied to parts in these vehicles often increases as the square or cube of the increased velocity.
In the interest of greater speed and rising costs of materials, the design engineer is always under pressure to reduce weight. This can sometimes be done by substituting aluminum or magnesium alloys for steel or iron, but such light alloy parts are not of the same size or design as those they replace. The tendency is also to reduce the size. These pressures on the designer have subjected parts of all sorts to increased stress levels. Even such commonplace objects as sewing machines, sauce pans and luggage are also lighter and more heavily loaded than ever before. The stress to be supported is seldom static. It often fluctuates and reverses at low or high frequencies. Frequency of stress reversals increases with the speeds of modern machines and thus parts tend to fatigue and fail more rapidly.
Another cause of increased stress on modern products is a reduction in the safety factor. An engineer designs with certain known loads in mind. On the supposition that materials and workmanship are never perfect, a safety factor of 2, 3, 5 or 10 is applied. Because of other considerations, a lower factor is often used, depending on the importance of lighter weight or reduced cost or risk to consumer.
New demands on machinery have also stimulated the development and use of new materials whose operating characteristics and performance are not completely known. These new materials create greater and potentially dangerous problems. As an example, there is a record of an aircraft being built from an alloy whose work hardening, notch resistance and fatigue life were not well known. After relatively short periods of service some of these aircraft suffered disastrous failures. Sufficient and proper nondestructive tests could have saved many lives.
As technology improves and as service requirements increase, machines are subjected to greater variations and to wider extremes of all kinds of stress, creating an increasing demand for stronger materials.
Engineering Demands for Sounder Materials
Another justification for the use of nondestructive tests is the designer's demand for sounder materials. As size and weight decrease and the factor of safety is lowered, more and more emphasis is placed on better raw material control and higher quality of materials, manufacturing processes and workmanship.
An interesting fact is that a producer of raw material or of a finished product frequently does not improve quality or performance until that improvement is demanded by the customer. The pressure of the customer is transferred to implementation of improved design or manufacturing. Nondestructive testing is frequently called on to deliver this new quality level.
Public Demands for Greater Safety
The demands and expectations of the public for greater safety are apparent everywhere. Review the record of the courts in granting higher and higher awards to injured persons. Consider the outcry for greater automobile safety, as evidenced by the required use of auto safety belts and the demand for air bags, blowout proof tires and antilock braking systems.
The publicly supported activities of the National Safety Council, Underwriters Laboratories, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States, and the work of similar agencies abroad, are only a few of the ways in which this demand for safety is expressed. It has been expressed directly by the many passengers who cancel reservations immediately following a serious aircraft accident. This demand for personal safety has been another strong force in the development of nondestructive tests.
Rising Costs of Failure
Aside from awards to the injured or to estates of the deceased, consider briefly other factors in the rising costs of mechanical failure. These costs are increasing for many reasons. Some important ones are:

greater costs of materials and labor;
greater costs of complex parts;
greater costs due to the complexity of assemblies;
greater probability that failure of one part will cause failure of others, due to overloads;
trend to lower factors of safety;
probability that the failure of one part will damage other parts of high value; and
failure of a part within an automatic production machine may shut down an entire high speed, integrated, production line. When production was carried out on many separate machines, the broken one could be bypassed until repaired. Today, one machine is tied into the production of several others. Loss of such production is one of the greatest losses resulting from part failure.

Responsibilities of Production Personnel and Inspectors

Labor today often means a machinery operator. Formerly, a laborer in a shop manually made a part and the work piece received individual attention. Today the laborer may be just as skilled but the skill is directed toward the operation of a machine. The machine requires attention rather than the work piece. Production rates are also higher. This prevents paying personal attention to individual parts.

Formerly everyone who worked on a part gave it some sort of inspection, even if cursory. Today that is seldom the case. Many production operations are covered by hoods, safety devices and other mechanical fixtures so that the operator scarcely sees the part. This has increased the number of inspectors and size and complexity of jobs. They, too, need faster, more definitive and more accurate test devices. Inspectors have become skilled specialists. They have progressed far beyond the individual who walked down the railroad track tapping car wheels with a hammer, scarcely knowing the purpose of the job. Today the railroad wheel is tested by specialists with far greater reliability and by infinitely superior means.

To meet demands of their customers, nondestructive testing specialists, physicists, metallurgists, chemists, electrical engineers and mechanical engineers continually develop better and more accurate tests. They find out more about materials and components than was ever known without destroying them. And when these scientists produce one new answer, they find that the user has posed two new problems.

One problem with increased use of nondestructive testing is that some people think of nondestructive testing as a cure-all. However, unless engineers design products that can be inspected, nondestructive testing will not be helpful. Nondestructive testing engineers must be involved early in the design process so that later they can provide service the design engineers require and also facilitate the job of the inspector.

In the 1930s, nondestructive testing, where it had been heard of at all, was generally considered an evil. Later it became a necessary evil. For a number of years now NDT has been a necessary aid in tens of thousands of shops in a multitude of industries. Most importantly, nondestructive testing has saved uncounted thousands of lives.

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