At Work: Peter Pelayo

How did you first become involved in NDT?

I went to high school at Don Bosco Technical Institute, where students could rotate through different technologies. I did the materials science program, and there was a portion dedicated to nondestructive testing—we covered MT, PT, UT, RT, and ET.

I thought NDT was just one of the coolest things I had ever seen, especially when I saw fluorescent green penetrant and the fluorescent mag particle. I took ASNT courses at night during my junior year because they said the industry would hire you right away if you had the hours already completed. The ASNT Greater Los Angeles Section taught those courses at my high school, and now I teach them.

When I graduated, I had an associate degree in science with an emphasis in materials science, and I had taken courses in radiation safety, penetrant, and mag particle. I went straight to work at a company called Arrowhead Products in Los Alamitos. They make fuel lines for the rocket industry, and my first job was working graveyard [shift], slapping penetrant on welds and cutting X-ray film.

Can you tell us about your current role?

I worked for 15 years focused on inspections, and then I took a job at Met-L-Chek. I had never thought about the OEM side of penetrant and magnetic particle testing, and it’s been a mind-blowing experience ever since. Now I’m on the side that supplies the products for inspection, and there’s a whole set of rules applicable to manufacturing consumables, like particle and liquid penetrant consumables. And then there’s fluorescent products, visible products, and products that are dual response.

So, I had to learn a whole new set of standards and specifications. There’s a whole industry behind the industry that OEMs are a part of, and committees through AMS and ASTM. We meet and vote on changes to the standard, especially as environmental and health and safety regulations come up, and then also [discuss] the challenges that we face—such as, “This material is no longer available, so what can we use instead?”

Another part of my job is technical support and product support for not just the aerospace industry, but also for oil and gas, energy, welding, shipbuilding, the reusable rocket industry, and the nuclear industry. When you’re going through NDT school and you’re working in NDT, the primary bulk of the workflow is in aerospace and oil and gas. But there are tons of industries that use our products, and so I’ve had to learn a lot, since my job is also supporting those industries that have their own standards and ways of doing things. Staying up to date on those codes is also part of my job.

Industry involvement is super important: networking events, reading newsletters and magazines, communicating with other NDT professionals. And teaching is always valuable. I used my ASNT books to train our lab technicians, as well as our product managers and customer service team.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges currently facing the industry?

The biggest challenge will always be how NDT keeps up with new technologies and manufacturing. We have a pretty good handle on aluminum, steel, plastics, and polymers. The challenges right now are additive manufacturing and carbon fiber composites. For example, if you look at the reusable rocket industry, they’re pushing the boundaries with materials science and parts that can be manufactured, and they’re using these parts not only in new environments, with new types of stresses, but they’re used again after a launch. So that will always be the challenge—how we interact and how we advance alongside new manufacturing techniques.

Another example: electric air taxis. These will pick people up from a specific point and fly them to the airport in battery-operated, electric air taxis. The frames and components that make up these electric aircraft are primarily comprised of carbon fiber composites. They need to be very, very lightweight, because we’re not using combustible engines anymore. We’re going to be using lithium-ion batteries to carry two to six passengers in a 150-mile (241 km) range. And this is a new venture that’s already here: it’s in Dubai and will be ready for the Olympics in Los Angeles. The questions are: What kind of inspection routines need to be followed? What’s the protocol? How many flight hours and what kind of stresses are these materials going to be experiencing that we haven’t really seen before?

Do you have a favorite quote or motto that you live by?

KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. At its core, NDT is very simple; there are enough methods for us to detect defects in parts. So, for me, the best way to approach most of the challenges we go through is determining: Is the defect surface or subsurface? OK, it’s subsurface. Well, we can eliminate all these other NDT methods. What’s the material? OK, well, this NDT method lends itself better to this material. What was the manufacturing problem? We have enough technology and enough knowledge to solve problems.

I tell my students all the time to just keep it simple. What’s the theory? What’s the material? What was the manufacturing process? What are the limitations of each NDT method? And from there, you can just start narrowing it down until you get to what you need.

And, from the customer support side, what is the customer asking? What do they need? Can you do it? Sometimes we’ll get questions where I don’t have an answer, and I have referred the customer over to a competitor and told them, “I don’t supply this, but my competitor does, and your inspection matters more to me than a sale.” The value in NDT and what we do is so important; it’s a hidden industry of people that keep this impossible infrastructure running.