NEWS

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27-04-2011

KCC presents first conference paper at the SPIE Symposium in Florida, 27 April 2011

Orlando Florida is better known for Disneyland and the Space Center but last week hosted the SPIE Symposium on Defense Security and Imaging attended by over 25,000 visitors with a rousing keynote speech by U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second highest ranking officer in the US military.

SPIE is the international society for Optics and Photonics and hosts a series of conferences and publications advancing the scientific research and engineering applications of optics, optical, photonic, imaging and optoelectronic technologies.  

KCC was approached by the Thermosense: Thermal Infrared Applications conference when members of the program committee heard about the original applied research and software development KCC is working on as part of the ComPair project.

The paper, written by the KCC thermographic team of Dr Bin Luo, Bjorn Liebenberg, Jeff Raymont and SP Santospirito and was very well received with particular commendations for the holistic engineer-friendly end-to-end design, the software's ability to automatically generate positions for the robot and thermographic cameras once the inspection panel and inspection system have been defined and the innovative statistical methods that allowed impact damage in composites to be correctly identified while separating complex background artefacts and inspection noise without human intervention.

For a copy of the paper click here and for further information on how KCC's thermographic software solutions within the Sentence Suite could be applied to your inspection requirements please contact us.

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27-04-2011

KCC and project partners file for a patent of its innovative rail weld defect detection system, 

Following the successful trials and commercial interest in innovative rail weld defect detection system developed by the Railect project which used the KCC Sentence Suite to identify defects in rail welds, KCC is filing for its first US patent.  

The Railect project successfully completed its aims of using phased array ultrasonic inspections to identify internal defects in aluminothermic welds that would have not been visible to visual inspections and which look at being a fraction of the cost of, much safer than and more quickly deployed than a radiographic inspection.  

Aluminothermic welds provide a fast, inexpensive way of welding rail track sections in the field.  Current NDT inspection systems are unable to identify whether an internal volumetric defect such as shrinkage cracks or individual or clustered porosity has been generated during the welding process.  

The innovative phased array UT system provides data to the KCC Sentence Suite which can then determine whether the internal section of the rail weld is sound or contains defected sections.  The software was also able to quantify and characterise defects and provided a simple Go / No Go traffic light system to assist rail inspection engineers in their jobs.  Consequently, anticipating exploitation by the SME beneficiaries of the Railect research, the SME Consortium members have filed for a US patent on the system.  

For a copy of the paper on Detection of Weld Defects in Rails using Phased Array Ultrasonic Analysis Software click here and for further information on how KCC's ultrasonic software solutions within the Sentence Suite could be applied to your inspection requirements please contact us.  

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09-03-2011

Pictures of uBGA 2nd Consortium meeting held in Dublin, Ireland.

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KCC congratulates John Heggarty from Intel who won an iPad for uBGA survey among SME's in Europe.