Nondestructive Evaluation has its origin with observers and inventors putting their solutions directly into application on existing problems. In these early cases, the time period from recognition of a problem, perception of a solution, and development of the technique to affect the solution could be very short. Often, the same people or same company would be involved from perception to application. In more recent years, there are more people involved in the technology development process, the various processes have become more specialized, and the time from perception to application has greatly lengthened. This paper will review some early development patterns for radiography, magnetics and ultrasonics where the time frame from perception to application is less than ten years. More recently, applications such as tip diffraction techniques in flaw sizing, phased array transducers and nondestructive materials analysis may take twenty-five years or longer to reach the acceptance level. Recent problems affecting this include a proliferation of research which may not have any real chance for application and an application work force that is not readily accepting of new technology. It is felt that better education of engineers in the principles and applications of nondestructive evaluation will speed along this acceptance of newer technology, and better focus NDE research.
展开▼
