Instrument hire provides access to the latest inspection technologies

As part of a strategy to create a ‘Centre of Excellence’ in Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) equipment, Ashtead Technology has invested heavily in both its rental fleet of instruments and technical support. In this article Neil Harrap, the company’s NDT Market Manager, highlights some of the inspection technologies that are most popular within the metal products manufacturing sector. He will explain how the addition of the latest ultrasonic inspection technology to the company’s fleet of rental instruments means that engineers now have access to the latest flaw detection and thickness measurement equipment, in addition to other key technologies such as visual inspection instruments and Positive Material Identification (PMI) equipment. Flaw detection and thickness The GE USM Go is ideal for the assessment of welds, forgings, castings and composite materials. Combining a thickness gauge and a flaw detector in one single lightweight instrument, this is available for hire with optional thickness and flaw detection kits. This means that NDT personnel now only need to carry one inspection instrument to perform accurate and dependable thickness measurement and flaw detection. A further benefit of this dual modality is a significant reduction in operator training times. Whilst the USM Go is capable of highly sophisticated measurements, it has been designed for simplicity. There is little need to refer to the manual; clear instructions are provided via the graphical user interface and navigation is simplified with an innovative joystick, allowing one-handed operation for fast and accurate adjustment, the unit can also be rotated for left or right handed operation. Precise time-of-flight is indicated in μs and an Automatic Gate Threshold for the 2 gates ensures highly accurate and reproducible measurements, and a Back Wall Echo (BWE) Attenuator helps identify low amplitude reflections.

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