COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

UNIVERSITI TENAGA NASIONAL

MEMB453 NON-DESTRUCTIVE TESTING

SEMESTER 1, 2017/18

ASSIGNMENT 1

NAME : SYAHIRAH BINTI RUSLAN

STUDENT ID : ME093046
PROGRAMME : BME
LECTURER : PROF. MADYA. DR. ABDUL AZIZ BIN MOHAMED
SUBMISSION DATE : 22 JUNE 2017
Reliability enhancement of NDI processes in ship
fabrication and maintenance industries using
machine vision approaches

Syahirah Binti Ruslan

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Kampus
Putrajaya
Email: syrsln@live.com

ABSTRACT
Visual inspection (VI) is one of the most useful methods of NDT used in many
engineering works, but is still subjected to inspection errors. Digital detectors and computer
technology have made it possible to automate some visual inspections and it is known as
machine vision inspection. In reference to machine vision role in the inspection system, this
paper will discuss on how the machine vision approaches could contribute in enhancing of
the reliability of NDI processes in ship fabrication and maintenance industries.

INTRODUCTION
Visual inspection is the oldest and most common non-destructive testing (NDT)
techniques. It is the general step in the inspection process to examine variety forms of
product including castings, forgings, machined components and weld elements. Several
characteristics about the part being examined may be determined, which include
dimensional conformance, the presence of discontinuities, general fit and wear, and simple
cosmetic compliance. Mechanical or optical aids are often necessary to perform VI including
such items as boroscopes, magnifying glasses, micrometers, mirrors and ultraviolet (UV)
lights. The quality of an inspection is affected primarily by four factors and they are the
quality of the detector (eye or camera), the lighting conditions, the capability to process the
visual data, and the level of training and attention to detail. With rapid technology
development these days, machine vision is becoming more common compared to visual
inspections completed by an inspector. The primary advantage of an inspector is their ability
to quickly adapt to a variety of lighting and other non-typical conditions, and their ability to
use other senses (touch, smell, etc.) while for machine vision inspection system is their
ability to make very consistent and rapid inspections of specific details of a component.
Inspection of highway bridges rely almost entirely on manual visual inspection to evaluate
the condition of the bridges and over 80 percent of all aircraft inspections are performed
visually by an inspector. Machine vision is mainly used in production applications where a
great number of components require inspection and the inspection conditions can be closely
controlled. The human eye is subjected to light intensity where the pupil is affected
according to certain wavelengths. VI application is for detection of surface anomalies such
as scratches, excess surface roughness, and areas void of paint or plating. This technique is
applied to discover crack, porosity, corrosion, foreign object and other flaw, dimensional
conformance, precision measurements, and component location.

Image processing is the most crucial and challenging part of the whole machine vision
system because it has a great effect in the result of welding defect detection. The image
processing algorithm is widely used for processing the structured light, and the purpose of
image processing is to get the feature point of structured light. The commonly used image
processing algorithms for pre-processing include image smooth, image enhancement, image
segmentation, edge detection; and the main image processing algorithms for feature point
detection includes corner detection, line fitting, circle fitting, Hough transform etc.. The image
method for structured light is more mature than the method for gray image from passive
vision. So, a series of image processing algorithms are proposed for gray image processing
in order to detect the defects.

DISCUSSION

I. MACHINE VISION APPROACHES IN SHIP FABRICATION

Shell-Tube Heat Exchanger Welding Inspection
All systems in a ship are interconnected with each other, in some way or the other. If one
system fails, the whole vessel can come to a standstill. Heat exchanger plays an important
role for efficient working of different systems in a ship, which include propulsion plant,
auxiliary power generation system, starting air system, fuel injection system (where fuel is
heated up in a heater with steam as the heating medium), refrigeration system, air
conditioning system, fresh water system, and steam turbine unit [2]. In terms of welding
quality inspection, there are several methods proposed by scholars who have conducted a
lot of research and below are the list of methods proposed:

1. The application of reverse engineering technique to measure the weld contour of

the fillet weld; and usage of laser scanner and the CAD software to measure and
 reconstruct the weld surface are to support this technique. The weld quality is
measured through obtaining the weld volume, weld size and profile.
2. The most important part of system is weld bead profile measurement. Hence, a
vision inspection system is proposed to measure and detect the defect of the
weld bead. The image processing and extraction algorithms for laser profile and
feature point were proposed alongside it.
3. A laser-based vision system can reconstruct the 3D profile of weld and determine
the position and size of defect. Another proposal includes a sophisticated vision
inspection to detect the surface defects for butt joint in metal inert gas (MIG)
welding; and this method uses four zones of LEDs for capturing different four
frames of sequence of images. Last, the back-propagation neural network was
used for classifying the defect into one of four predefined ones.
4. A laser-vision-based welding quality inspection system for small-sized beads.
The majority of the work is weld joint profile extraction, weld bead size
measurement and defect detection. In addition to that, a sliding vector method to
detect the feature point.
5. A methodology to model and control of weld bead in the gas metal arc welding
(GMAW) process. The weld bead is measured using a vision system with a low-
price webcam. A DSLR camera could be set up with software to achieve a scaled
model reconstruction of weld, and measure the geometrical feature of defects
detected.

The quality inspection system is composed of two parts: the hardware system and the
software system. The software system in this section we refer to Visual C++ 6.0 and
OpenCV software. The main objective of automatic detection is to obtain a clear digital
image. Thus, a set of special hardware system for welding seam image acquisition is set up
according to the working condition of the welding process. The hardware system includes
welding robot, industrial control computer, charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, a focus
lens, an optical filter, working platform and light source. The welding robot and vision sensor
diagrams are shown in Figs. 1 and 2.
Fig. 1 The welding robot

Fig. 2 Diagram of vision sensor

The working principle of the welding quality inspection system is shown in Fig. 3.
 Fig. 3 Principle diagram of welding quality inspection system

The welding specification of shell-tube welding is determined, and then automatic

welding is carried out. The welded shell-tube as the object of the system needs to be
detected. Because the shell-tube is fixed on the platform, the image acquisition of the shell-
tube welding can be realized by controlling the movement speed of the welding robot. With
the welding robot's nonstop movement to achieve image acquisition of shell-tube welding,
CCD camera will obtain the welding image information in real time. At the same time, the
welding image information is converted into digital signal, and input to the computer through
the interface. Then the image is processed by the system software, for example image
smoothing, enhancement, segmentation, and a series of pre-processing operation. After the
pre-treatment, the image can be used to detect weld defects, and then determine the
accurate position of the defects.

II. MACHINE VISION APPROACHES IN MAINTENANCE

INDUSTRIES Rail Transportation
In railway transportation, there has been an effort to increase the number of wheels with
measured profile parameters and reduce the number of condemnable wheels in service by
applying machine vision-based wayside inspection systems to virtually gage all wheels of
passing trains. Transportation Technology Centre, Inc. (TTCI) evaluated that wheel-related
expenses (inspection, maintenance, and replacement) make up about 37 percent of annual
car maintenance costs. The main indicators of worn wheels are wheel profile parameters
that reach condemnable limits imposed by industry maintenance standards. These
parameters include flange thickness, flange height, rim thickness, and tread hollow (hollow-
worn wheels). To monitor profile parameters, inspectors attempt to visually check each
wheel on inbound and outbound trains. One system used lasers to highlight the wheel
profile, and the other used high intensity strobes to take a picture of the wheel. Both systems
used video frame capture technology and proprietary algorithms to analyse the data and
calculate profile parameters. For each system evaluation, a test consist (a lineup of
sequence of railway carriages or cars) was assembled and run by the system at various
speeds and lighting conditions. The profiles for test wheels were measured with a MiniProf
profilometer, and the four primary profile parameters were determined for each wheel prior to
testing. Profilometer is a measuring instrument used to measure a surfaces profile, in order
to quantify its roughness. Both systems were used during the tests to measure the wheel
profiles and associated profile parameters. Through subsequent analysis, the system-
derived parameters were compared to MiniProf parameter values for each test wheel to
determine the tested system measurement accuracy. Both systems were found to be
capable of delivering measurement accuracies of greater than 90 percent for three of the
four parameters.

CONCLUSION
Visual inspection checks a large number of welds (products) one by one which is easy to
cause the eye fatigue of workers and thus the undetected risk. Hence, the visual inspection
cannot guarantee the quality of all welds. With the always evolving and growing technology,
the machine vision detection technology developed rapidly and has features of non-contact,
high efficiency and good stability.

REFERENCES

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