Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ShipTest (Fully automated laser guided inspection robot for weld defect detection on ship hulls)

Teaser

The European ship fleet counts 23,000 vessels, accounting for the 40% of the global gross tonnage. Marine industry is a major prosperity engine of the EU contributing a total of €147bn to the GDP and supporting more than 1.7m jobs.Vessels’ structural integrity verification...

Summary

The European ship fleet counts 23,000 vessels, accounting for the 40% of the global gross tonnage. Marine industry is a major prosperity engine of the EU contributing a total of €147bn to the GDP and supporting more than 1.7m jobs.
Vessels’ structural integrity verification is a major issue for the shipping industry. Regulations dictate that Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) inspections should be performed every 5 years for the first decade of a vessel’s life and every 2.5 years thereafter. Ship hull weld inspection is a challenging process as safety-critical welds length exceeds 120km in large vessels and involves human inspectors on site using scaffolding or cherry-pickers. These procedures require long periods of drydocking incurring loss of revenue and costs amounting to more than €150k per inspection. Moreover conventional ultrasonic techniques cannot be applied on metal plates of thickness <10mm, which are commonly used nowadays to reduce ship weight. This necessitates the use of dangerous radiographic techniques posing health and safety issues. These challenges give rise to a unique business opportunity which SpectrumLabs and Tecnitest (leading NDT equipment and service providers) along with Innora (dynamic high-tech company specializing in robotics) and TWI (global leader in NDT technology) aspire to seize with the help of Lloyds’ Register, the most reputable shipping service provider with 230 years of experience.
We aim to redefine ship NDT inspection by commercializing Spectre-X, a laser-guided robotic crawler able to automatically track welding and inspect the hull for corrosion while the ship is at sea. Through a combination of bleeding-edge ultrasonic and electromagnetic techniques Spectre-x can accurately inspect metal plates of <10mm thickness eliminating the need for radiography. The robot can be set-up and operated by non-specialized crew members so that there is no need for NDT experts on board. The data produced will be uploaded on an online cloud platform for remote analysis and results interpretation.
Spectre-X ability to perform ship’s in-service inspection is crucial in commercial and financial terms as current methods require the ship to be dry-docked incurring expenses and revenue loss amounting to more than €150k per ship inspection.

Work performed

\"During the first period of ShipTest, most of the weight fell on better defining what was technically required from “Spectre-X”, the name chosen for the robotic system. From the time the proposal was submitted, technological advances in NDT electronics allowed for a much more compact system to be developed. It was agreed from the onset of the project that to make the Spectre-X commercially viable the level of miniaturization required to make it robust enough for real world use would require complete redesign and use of board level electronics. Although the penalty for a complete redesign in terms of time was significant, the Consortium took the decision to proceed and the he construction of the first unit is expected to finish in the last week of February 2018.
The work carried out in WP1 represents the effort towards the modelling and design of the commercial ShipTest robotic system. The assembly of the full integrated system is ongoing.
WP2 a software development package was separated in three tasks. The unification of the software that controls the four distinct subsystems of Spectre-X, the redesign of the main Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the development of a cloud infrastructure software to organise, secure and streamline inspection data during a Spectre-X field deployment by the clients. The Cloud software platform prepared by Innora/TWI in WP2 was rolled out in October 2017 allowing for some work preparation for WP3.
While waiting for the first Spectre-x unit to roll out, critical design review started taking place for WP4. As part of WP5 the web site was set up, the name \"\"Spectre-X\"\" and a logo was designed and some networking has helped increasing the awareness of Spectre-X.
\"

Final results

The Spextre-X system revolutionizes the hull inspection market offering:
• On-board inspection while the ship is afloat
• Concurrent triple-mode NDT Inspection, 38% faster than the current state-of-the-art systems
• Consistent automated examination via a robotic platform able to reach areas inaccessible to human inspectors without supportive equipment
• Hull inspection with no need of practices dangerous for human like scaffolding or radiography
• Straightforward set-up and operation feasible to be carried out by non-experts
• Automated data collection, pre-processing and online storage for remote expert data interpretation and report generation.
• Parallel testing and system validation in fields other than marine (wind turbines, power generation, tank storage) increase commercial potential and value of Spectre-X.
• Increased awareness of Classification Societies’ technical potential and data/record management of Spectre-X is expected to lead to endorsement of the system and the service

Website & more info

More info: http://shiptest.eu.