[5B1] The development and use of two innovative techniques for the inspection of industrial structures
A Shibli and A Merrison
European Technology Development (ETD), UK
This paper describes two inspection techniques that European Technology Development (ETD) has developed recently and which it has been using for industrial inspection worldwide. The scanning force microscope (SFM) is a portable version of the atomic force microscope. This was developed to detect on-site early-stage creep cavitation in the new high-Cr martensitic steel components used in advanced power plants. This is because the traditional NDE techniques (replication, UT) used to inspect these components have not been so successful due to the nano, or only a few microns, level of creep cavitation that is shown by these steels until late in life, with the risk of catastrophic failure before the next outage. SFM has also proved to be useful for the study of microstructural constituents and precipitates in all types of metals and alloys. Electrical discharge sampling equipment (EDSE) is a portable spark erosion machine that has been developed for cutting out, almost non-destructively, thin slices of thick-section industrial components for detailed study in the laboratory.
