Automated NDT system for filament wound tubes

This sys­tem is used for auto­mat­ed, non-destruc­tive test­ing of fil­a­ment wound pipes. The pipes are rotat­ed in 90° steps around their axis to mon­i­tor four cir­cum­fer­en­tial seg­ments. Two SE4 sen­sors with 2 x 4000 px are applied per seg­ment along the tube axis. For a tube length of 1m @ 8000 px, this leads to 0.125 mm/px spa­tial pix­el res­o­lu­tion for all 8 image seg­ments. After insert­ing the pipes the ends are auto­mat­i­cal­ly sealed and inter­nal pres­sure is used as the load­ing method. Since this cor­re­sponds to the usu­al oper­at­ing load of the tubes, the mea­sured defor­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion visu­al­izes main­ly the rel­e­vant struc­tur­al defects in con­trast to oth­er load­ing meth­ods such as ther­mal load­ing.

Due to the high defor­ma­tion sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the SE4 sen­sors com­bined with the high spa­tial pix­el res­o­lu­tion even the small­est defects can be detect­ed. An oper­a­tor final­ly cat­e­go­rizes the object as IO / NIO. Auto­mat­ed or AI-based image analy­sis is pos­si­ble, but it depends on the appli­ca­tion and detec­tion require­ments. At the end of the mea­sure­ment, a report is gen­er­at­ed and auto­mat­i­cal­ly stored as a PDF in a direc­to­ry spec­i­fied by the user.

The tubes are insert­ed and removed man­u­al­ly. An exten­sion with col­lab­o­ra­tive robots or inte­gra­tion into pro­duc­tion lines is pos­si­ble. Sev­er­al thou­sand tubes have already been test­ed per year with­out prob­lems and maintenance.