Civil Engineering NDT Group

The following is an interview with Joshua Elliott, Technology Manager (Metrology & NDT) at The Manufacturing Technology Centre and Co-Chair of BINDT’s Civil Engineering NDT Group.

Please give a brief history of the group, when it was founded, etc.
The group came about following an action of a BINDT/Research Centre in Non-destructive Evaluation (RCNDE)/Infrastructure Industry Innovation Partnership (i3P)/Construction Industry Research and Information Association (CIRIA) workshop held in 2022 on the requirements of non-destructive testing (NDT), condition monitoring (CM) and structural health monitoring (SHM) for civil engineering.

The group was formed in October 2023 and has held four meetings to date. Members include representatives from research and technology organisations (RTOs), engineering consultants, asset operators and others, including some who are not yet members of BINDT. It thus serves to fill a gap in engagement between the NDT community and the civil engineering sector, which is a larger gap compared to other sectors, for example aerospace.

Some readers might not be familiar with civil engineering NDT techniques. Please briefly explain these.
The variety of structures that require NDT is very broad. We usually categorise civil engineering NDT techniques by physical principle. These vary from simple visual inspection and tactile testing to advanced techniques such as photogrammetry, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and ultrasonics. Eddy current testing is used extensively for rebar diameter measurement and to measure the distance between the surface of reinforced concrete and the top of the first layer of rebar (the so-called ‘cover’ depth). Some advanced technology is also being explored and is currently at a low technology readiness level (TRL). This includes muon tomography (‘muography’), which utilises cosmic rays to image large civil engineering structures in 3D.

What are the purposes of the group?
The group’s purposes include establishing requirements to improve NDT solutions within the civil engineering sector, including training and certification, facilitating a network and knowledge sharing. One way that the group addresses the latter purpose is by hosting one or two technical presentations at every group meeting. We also have a longer-term ambition to deliver a roadmap for inspection technology development that is required by the civil engineering sector to feed into work conducted by RTOs and academic institutions. For this reason, the group has partnered with the RCNDE management team to share requirements regarding the sector.

What is your role within the group?
I am one of the Co-Chairs together with Mike Laws, Principal Consultant & Business Development Manager at ESR Technology. All other members/meeting attendees have equal standing.

What are the key achievements of the group?
We have made good progress on documenting the civil engineering industry requirements on NDT and SHM. We intend to publish this as a BINDT document in due course.

We ran a Special Interest Group meeting on reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in 2023, in the wake of structural failures of UK school buildings that contained RAAC. This generated lots of technical discussion and positively influenced technology development towards solving the inspection challenges associated with RAAC.

What are the latest opportunities that the group is working on?
As mentioned above, RAAC is a topic of interest at the moment. Other topics include increasing the efficiency of inspection, both the data collection itself and the data processing. There are also some potential quick wins to be gained by the judicious use of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automated deployment platforms such as drones and crawler robots.

How can interested companies/individuals get involved in the group?
For further information and to express an interest in participating in the work of the group, contact Josh Elliott at joshua.elliott@the-mtc.org or Eleanor Flower at eleanor.flower@bindt.org

Representatives from the group will be attending BINDT’s NDT 2024 Conference (Telford, 3-5 September 2024) and the Indian Society for NDT’s NDE 2024 Conference & Exhibition (Chennai, 12-14 December 2024) to present on our NDT research within the civil engineering space. Please contact Josh Elliott for more information.

The next group to be featured in the ‘In Focus’ column will be the Practitioner Committee. If you have questions for this group, please send them to Corinne Mackle at ndtnews@bindt.org or Maria Felice at mvfelice@gmail.com. The value of this column depends on your questions, so please do send them in. It is your choice whether we keep them anonymous or mention your name.

Looking for the People in NDE column? This column will continue on an occasional basis, so if you have any interviewees to recommend, or would like to be featured yourself, please contact the editor at ndtnews@bindt.org or email Maria Felice at mvfelice@gmail.com

   
  Josh Elliott performing a ground-penetrating radar scan of a reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete panel
Image courtesy of The Manufacturing Technology Centre Ltd
 

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