SBIR/STTR Award attributes
The Air Force needs to sustain critical ICBM launch silo steel liners for decades to come and seeks a significant improvement in NDT for corrosion mapping of entire surfaces. Our advanced, intuitive digital features (e.g., guided calibration, fully customizable touch-screen interfaces, operator-assisted interpretative data tools integrated with a unique, advanced silo robot) will provide productive, rapid, and effective corrosion/thickness loss situational awareness. By leveraging and integrating industry-proven Phased Array Ultrasonic NDT and new, customized robotic crawler approach ideal for silos, we will develop, integrate, test advanced, fully automated corrosion mapping NDT solution using best-of-class hardware/software.The user friendly system will be portable while being responsive to their silo or other large scale surface scanning needs to detect defect types, sizes, and spatially correlate to locations across these large inspection zones. This effort provides a high return on investment with new automated capabilities over existing inefficient methods used, delivers elegant scan path planning, and supports 3D scan modeling/simulations to enhance tools and inspection execution. The first silo scan setup/implementation will significantly accelerate the setup for all remaining silos.Custom, preinstalled inspection applications reduce training times and guide users through inspection procedures to improve productivity and minimize training costs.
