Scientific and Technical

The Scientific and Technical Hub (PST) draws on the Permanent Scientific Committee (CSP) and the COFREND network of experts which is currently being formed.

The PST Executive Committee comprises seven members from the CSP. The CSP has thirty members including five consultants from the academic sector.

The Executive Committee meets about five or six times a year whilst the CSP meets twice a year, in June and November, to assess the working groups and set guidelines for the year to come.

The PST has set itself four major objectives that it has met:

  • Define the five-year strategic plan;
  • Monitor the Working Groups (WG) to assist the commissions in meeting their objectives;
  • Promote high scientific level in COFREND;
  • Assist the governance in constructing its network of experts.

 

Promoting a high scientific level in COFREND, a window open on the future for NDT: COFREND “Doctoriales”

COFREND has always placed academic or industrial research high on its list of priorities, through researchers presenting their work during themed COFREND Technical seminars or through conferences and “poster” sessions during the COFREND National Days.

In 2015, it wished to devote two days to researchers by organising the first COFREND “Doctoriales” on 15-16 June in the Ile-de-France region. Given the success of this initial event, the Doctoriales are now included in the PST agenda with a second event held on November 2016. They continue to be held at eighteen-month intervals.

 

Five-year strategic plan. The strategic plan focuses on five major areas

Factories of the Future

The ever-increasing importance of digital technology in the entire life cycle of products, advances in robotics and new processes such as additive manufacturing will have a considerable influence on the techniques and place of NDT in product quality.  These changes must be anticipated to create conditions for providing innovative solutions exploiting these technologies in the best possible way and for supervising their use by the operators.

Renewable energy

The development of renewable energy, especially wind turbines, will result in a mix of materials in the same structure and therefore very varied NDT requirements. Testing these structures should increasingly call on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems. Adopting these new techniques should be supported and encapsulated.

Digitization and Big Data

Increasing volumes of rich and informative data are being generated by NDT, but they are often only partially used. These data can be generated in the production phase and during the life of the product and are a source of information (robotics, online monitoring, SHM, imaging, etc.) that can be used for quality diagnostic purposes. Storage, data processing and statistical analysis tools are at the heart of future diagnostics. It is important to support and encapsulate these new quality diagnostic elements that could potentially lead to standardisation.

Man and NDT

Tomorrow, NDT must incorporate all these technical changes with their impact on work organisation, management systems and inter-player relationships (suppliers, service providers, customers, etc.). Increased technical sophistication of operations, access to decision-making systems for operators, shared scheduling via the Internet and digital tools. Incorporating these new technologies will go hand-in-hand with new training instruments and greater appeal to young generations. The challenge is to make increasingly complex processes as intuitive as possible whilst leaving humans at the heart of NDT processes.

“Green” NDT

Environmental concerns have become central to society as a whole. In NDT, this means reflecting and promoting new techniques and practices that are:

  • environmentally friendly;
  • energy saving;
  • sources of advances in health and safety.