Frikkie de Beer is a chief scientist and head of Radiography/Tomography Section in the Radiation Science Department at the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation(Necsa). He has 23 years experience of radiation related sciences, and more specifically neutron imaging. Frikkie co-pioneered the establishment of neutron radiography at the SAFARI-1 research reactor neutron beam lines and later became the technical driver and champion for the establishment of a fully digital tomography capability at the SAFARI-1 nuclear research reactor.  This was achieved in 2003 in collaboration with Paul Sherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. It is still the only facility of this nature in the Southern hemisphere. In acknowledgement of his achievements over the years, Frikkie de Beer was awarded the 2003 Necsa Chairman’s award as best performer and also the 2010 Necsa CEO award as activator and innovator.

He is a NRF rated scientist that collaborates with a network of scientific collaborators from a large number of fields.  Frikkie has more than 20 peer reviewed papers on a variety of applications of neutron- and X-ray imaging in collaboration with international researchers and post graduate students from local higher educational institutes and research centers. In addition he made numerous contributions at national and international conferences. His own research focuses on the application of radiation imaging to quantitative investigation of porous media with application in the fields of nuclear waste technology, civil engineering, energy efficiency, geosciences, mining and petrophyscs.

Frikkie was elected as President of the International Society for Neutron Radiology (ISNR) in 2006. In this capacity, under his initiative, South Africa hosted the 9^th World Conference on Neutron Radiography (WCNR-9) in October 2010 at Kwa-Maritane, Pilansberg, where 80 delegates representing 21 countries participated. He represents Necsa as corporate member of the South African Institute of Non-destructive Testing (SAINT) and is a member of the applied and Industrial specialist group of the South Africa Institute for Physics.

Frikkie has been intimately involved with capacity building and training and holds a position as adjunct lecturer for the Centre for Applied Radiation Science and Technology at the Mafikeng campus of North West University, for the past 10 years. 

His development work in improving South Africa’s non-destructive imaging capability is ongoing in the forms of upgrading the Necsa Neutron Radiography/Tomography to competitive international standards. Together with complementary X-ray imaging research facilities, also initiated by Frikkie, this forms part of the establishment of a National Centre for Radiography and Tomography as part of a more comprehensive National beam line Centre on the Necsa site.

He is happily married to Chevaune, a teacher and has 3 kids – Joalet, Elisna and Frikkie (jr). 

Abstract

Neutron Radiography and its Application to NDT

Neutron imaging has been established over the past 30 years as a valuable non-destructive testing technique complementary to X-ray imaging. Although reported applications and utilization within the industrial community are still limited, this unique technique has found rapidly growing utilization as research tool. The growing number of papers in international journals on neutron imaging applications in a large number of fields reveals this and shows how the unique interaction of neutrons with materials can unlock information not available by other techniques. Altough neutron beam line facilities are not readily available in all countries, this unique NDT-technique is still an important tool to be explored.

Over the past 30 years the international neutron imaging community has organized several International world conferences and topical meetings to share information and direct development trends. The last such event, the 9th World Conference on Neutron Radiography, took place in 2010 in Pilansberg in South Africa.

In this talk the latest trends in NDT-techniques as revealed during the many interesting contributions at the 2010 Conference will be shared. In addition the major neutron radiography/tomography facility upgrading initiative currently under way at Necsa, Pelindaba, will be discussed as the latter will make many of the exiting new state of the art applications available to the South African industry and researchers within the National System of Innovation.