A comprehensive yet cohesive Non Destructive Evaluation (NDE) Laboratory will be established. Recently there have been significant advances in NDE methods and equipment that have led to greater utilization by manufacturing engineers for the assurance of product safety, quality and reliability of their products. The need for NDE will continue to increase as new materials are manufactured in more complex ways, service lifes are expanded and production facilities become more fully automated. The educational objective leading to the establishment of this laboratory is to expose undergraduate engineering students who i) enroll in a NDE course, ii) do a senior project using a proposed NDE system, or iii) participate in a course using one or more NDE systems for experiments, to a comprehensive set of contemporary NDE systems, review the scientific principles on which each system is based and to have them become proficient with state-of- the-art, user-friendly NDE instrumentation. Equipment in the areas of thermography, ultrasonics, eddy current, magnetoelastic (Barkhausen) effect, acoustic emission, speckle pattern interferometry, laser doppler velocimeter-vibrometry and laser optical scanning microscopy are required. Students will be attracted from various engineering departments, thus fostering the cooperation and interaction so necessary to an integrated, systems approach to manufacturing.
