From NDT to prognostics: advanced technologies for improved quality, safety and reliability

Conventional NDT is a mature technology, for which there is a significant instrumentation and services market expected to reach $6.88B by 2020. NDT is seeking to become more quantitative and leverage advances in instrumentation. In addition aspects of the field are undergoing significant transition as new materials and advanced manufacturing are seeing increased usage. The landscape is further changing with moves toward structural health monitoring (SHM) and advanced diagnostics, which are bring SHM and NDE together to give complementary data, as operators are seeking to address requirements for safe life estimation, condition based maintenance (CBM) and prognostics. The limitations and capabilities are discussed including for the implementation of prognostics, together with various technical challenges in moving from NDT to prognostics.