Capability
Boulder · New Mexico · United Kingdom
Capabilities / Mag NDT
Mag NDT
Non-destructive testing using magnetic sensing, reading through material rather than around it.
The problem
Why this is hard
Inspection is expensive because it usually means stopping. A line is halted, a component is removed, a section is opened up, and the cost of finding nothing is borne anyway. Methods that avoid all that tend to be either slow, tied to a specialist operator, or limited to surfaces. What is wanted is a reading taken from outside the part that says something reliable about the inside of it, at a rate that matches how quickly the parts are made or the asset is traversed.
The answer
What the sensor does
A void, a crack or a change in wall thickness deflects magnetic flux around it, and a sensitive enough magnetometer sees that deflection from outside the material. The constraint has never been the physics; it has been building an instrument small enough, stable enough and cheap enough to put in an array or on a moving head. That is a manufacturing problem, which is the problem this company was built to work on.
Applications
Example applications
Pipeline inspection
Wall loss and cracking read from outside the pipe, without excavating or taking the line out of service.
Electronics manufacturing
Joints and internal structure verified on the line rather than sampled after the fact.
Automotive and aerospace parts manufacturing
Subsurface defects caught at the point they are made, on parts where opening one up destroys it.