Introduction
Destructive testing of spot welds can be costly and time consuming. Many automotive companies are adopting various forms of Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) systems. One of the most effective that has been used in auto manufacturing for years is ultrasonic NDT. If you have spent time creating inspection plans for an NDT system to evaluate the integrity of spot welds, you know that the process can be complex and time consuming. It is valuable to have a tool that allows you to easily take information from a weld plan and automatically generate an inspection plan to be used on an ultrasonic NDT system.
Inspection Plan Builder tool
Your NDT system is only as good as the inspection plan to assure your spot welds meet your requirements. Ideally, your inspection plan builder tool will quickly and easily accept information from your weld plan and be based on an application that you are familiar with. Progenero Products SpotSight system provides a Microsoft Excel based tool that lets you copy and paste information from your weld plan or any table of weld information and paste the data into the tool. Once you have the information inserted, you simply click a button and you have a plan that can be installed on the NDT system.
Sometimes it is valuable to modify the plan and doing that is easy to do with this tool. All you need to do is bring up the tool and make the needed changes and click the button to create the revised plan. You can change the plan or copy it to modify and use for other inspections as needed.
Conclusion
If your NDT system is hard to program, you are more likely to settle for inspection plans that don’t provide accurate results. The right NDT system should provide you with the right tools to make it easy to develop inspection plans that work well with your system. Being able to quickly create inspection plans allows you to create, test, and modify plans that best meet your needs to assure you are making good welds.