Tom Bertenshaw

Our interviewee this month is Tom Bertenshaw, Senior NDT Research Engineer at GKN Aerospace and Chair of BINDT’s Full Matrix Capture (FMC) User Group.

Describe your current role
I have been working at GKN Aerospace since 2010. I joined as a composites research engineer; however, one of the first projects I was assigned to was related to NDT. I then became the ‘NDT guy’ and picked up all NDT research projects or NDT aspects of projects. I decided to fully embrace NDT as a career path in 2016, when I became a BINDT Member, and started to think about NDT more strategically. I now develop existing and new NDT technologies for aerospace products.

What education or training route did you follow?
I finished school with A-Levels in maths and science subjects. I always knew I wanted to be an engineer, so I started a degree at the University of Portsmouth in Engineering Design & Materials and completed this course, which included a year in industry working for Toshiba in Plymouth. After a year struggling to find an engineering job after graduation, I changed tack and started an MSc in Composites Materials at Imperial College. I successfully completed this Masters course and it definitely paid off.

What other roles and jobs have you had in the past?
My first engineering job was at Cobham Advanced Composites straight after completing my MSc. I spent four years there as a composites manufacturing engineer before moving to GKN Aerospace.

What would you consider to be your biggest NDE achievements and challenges to date?
Probably putting together the NDE workstream for a GKN-led project in 2017, named DATIAS, an ATI-funded project monitored through Innovate UK. This led to a few things, which allowed me to work closely with one of the GKN sites, use new technologies, such as full matrix capture (FMC)/the total focusing method (TFM), and also consider a more strategic focus on NDE for the ‘factory of the future’ concept. More recently, GKN has relied on me to create an inspection process, with all the associated documentation, to ultrasonically inspect a pre-production 17 m composite spar.

What do you think are the pressing challenges for the NDE industry?
People are talking about Industry 4.0 a lot. Sure, I think this is important, but in many cases we have to get basic automation right first (Industry 3.0!). I know of many places where we are still doing manual inspections and no data is collected. There are a lot of top-down initiatives to try to resolve this, but I think just as much work needs to be done at the ‘grass roots’ to really understand any barriers to achieving full or assisted automation. I also think standardisation and training on new NDT techniques should be a priority. Oh, and with the ageing demographic within the NDE industry, training the new generation of practitioners and engineers is so important… the current students and apprentices are our future!

What changes do you foresee for NDE in the future?
I think the projected shortfall in NDT practitioners will force a change in the NDE industry whether we like it or not. We may need to implement technologies such as automated defect recognition or automation of NDT processes more widely; that may mean a shift towards more engineers and Level 3 practitioners and fewer Level 2 practitioners. But I think the future for NDE will always be healthy as it will always be needed in safety-critical industries.

How would you describe NDE to someone who has not heard of it before?
The conversation may go something like: “Well, you know the equipment used for scanning pregnant women? Similar technology/equipment is used to inspect aerospace parts to look for defects….”

Please get in touch if you have any recommendations for future interviewees or would like to be interviewed yourself. Contact the editor at ndtnews@bindt.org or email Maria Felice direct at mvfelice@gmail.com

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