Professor Peter Cawley leads the Imperial College Nondestructive Testing research group which currently comprises another professor, a lecturer and 20 PhD students, EngD students and postdocs. The group was awarded an EPSRC platform grant in 2000 in recognition of its international reputation and potential for further development and the grant was renewed in 2005 and again in 2010.

Professor Cawley is the lead academic in the EPSRC-industry funded UK Research Centre in NDE (RCNDE) that was launched in 2003 and has now been renewed until 2014. The Centre is based at Imperial College and has 17 full industrial members including Rolls Royce, BNFL, Airbus, Shell, BAe Systems, SERCO Assurance, BP, Network Rail, Alstom Power, British Energy, Petrobras, E-ON, RWE npower, GKN, Tenaris, HSE and dstl.

The driving motivation of Professor Cawley's work is to solve real industrial inspection problems, achieved by conducting thorough scientific research. His work spans fundamental scientific studies through to the transfer of technology to industry.  He collaborates and consults with numerous industrial partners, and technology he has developed is now being exploited by three spin-out companies, and through two other licence agreements. He is chairman of Permasense Ltd that sells an intrinsically safe, wireless ultrasonic thickness monitoring system developed in the group that will monitor wall thickness up to 600C and transmit the data back to a gateway located in an un-zoned area. He is also a director of Guided Ultrasonics Ltd that sells guided wave inspection and monitoring technology originally developed in the group.

Professor Cawley has written over 160 refereed journal papers and a similar number of conference papers, and holds four current patents. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Presentation Title: Guided Waves for NDT and Permanently Installed Monitoring

Guided wave inspection is now established for the screening of pipes in the petrochemical industry. It is typically possible to inspect 20-30 metres or more in each direction from a single transducer location, so the technique makes it possible to obtain 100% coverage of large areas of structure; it is also possible to test road crossings or penetrations into concrete without the need for excavation. Likewise buried lines can be tested by excavating pits at intervals along the line without the need to expose the whole line. Even though guided wave inspection greatly reduces the area of structure that must be accessed to carry out the test, in many cases a large fraction of the cost of the inspection is incurred in gaining access to the transducer attachment location. It is therefore very attractive only to incur this cost once and to permanently install a transducer system that can subsequently be interrogated periodically via a cable running to a convenient location. This also introduces the possibility of tracking damage growth by comparing current signals with the baseline taken at installation, but this requires a very stable transduction system and changes in environmental conditions such as temperature must be accounted for. This paper will review the use of guided waves for one-off inspection, and then discuss the extension of the method to permanently installed monitoring. Industrial applications of both one-off testing and permanently installed monitoring will be given.