Strategic NDT Leadership Forum

The following is an interview with Mark Dowell, Chair of the BINDT Strategic NDT Leadership Forum…

Please give a brief history of the Forum, when it was founded, etc.
The BINDT Strategy Retreats in 2018 and 2019 identified a need for BINDT to become more involved strategically in the non-destructive testing (NDT) industry, including keeping the NDT landscape reporting up to date, capturing requirements from various industry sectors, etc. The board of the Research Centre in NDE (RCNDE) also ran a workshop in 2019 where this need for better strategic leadership of NDT became clear, covering more sectors than RCNDE could cover and working on transitioning NDT technologies and influencing the wider engineering community (design, materials and stress engineers) about design for inspection and the benefits that improved NDT can bring. At the BINDT Aerospace Event in 2019, a representative of the structural health monitoring (SHM) community also acknowledged that this community was without effective UK leadership at present.

To address these observations, in 2019 BINDT established an Advisory Group on Strategic NDT Leadership to support the establishment of an effective and long-term leadership forum (the ‘Strategic NDT Leadership Forum’), outside of specific institutions.

What are the purposes of the Forum?
The purposes of the Forum include:

• Briefing government and influencing other engineering professions about the benefits of NDT, condition monitoring (CM) and SHM.

• Ensuring adequate, well-trained NDT engineers.

• Capturing the NDT/CM/SHM requirements from each sector to inform research and development (R&D) strategy and initiate protocols, best-practice guides and standards to underpin technology transitioning, including technology and technique qualification and training.

• Anticipating the form of roles in future Industry 4.0-based NDT/CM/SHM provision and advising on the future supply of well-trained personnel for those roles.

• Initiating the development of protocols, best-practice guides and standards to underpin technology transitioning, including technology and technique qualification and training.

• Creating and defining routes for meeting end-user industry requirements and streamlining communication between stakeholders.

What is your personal role within the Forum?
Robert Smith (BINDT President, 2015-2016), who was tasked with setting up the Forum, assigned me as the Founding Chair and I remain the Chair to this day.

Is the Forum working on any particular projects? Please describe these.
There are six working groups reporting to the Executive Forum, the purpose of which is to deliver on the Forum’s objectives. These groups are: Landscaping, Engineering, People, Requirements, Research and Technology. A working group that is worth highlighting here is the Landscaping one, where the members are preparing an updated NDT Landscape Report, which is due for publication in 2026.

The previous version was published in 2012 by Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), now Innovate UK Business Connect. The report can be accessed here: www.bindt.org/downloads/Materials-KTN-Future-of-NDT-in-UK-economy.pdf

What, in particular, would you like readers to appreciate about the Forum?
The Forum brings together a vast group of senior, experienced people from multiple sectors and this enables invaluable two-way sharing. Executive Forum representatives hail from BINDT, National Physical Laboratory (NPL), RCNDE, TWI, the Catapult Network, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)/Innovate UK, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). Working group members are from these organisations, as well as from regulators, NDT end-users, NDT supply chain organisations and others. The value of including such a range of NDT and ‘non-NDT’ industry experts in the dialogue enables a comprehensive and aligned strategic plan for the UK NDT industry to be a reality.

How can interested individuals get involved?
The Forum is keen to hear from anyone who would like to get involved, in particular those willing to contribute to the engineering and requirements working groups. The mission of the engineering group is to meet both present and future needs of end-users of NDT, while the requirements group aims to capture and publish specific requirements for sectors or materials.

Please email info@bindt.org for more information.

Another group will feature in a future issue of NDT News.

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