Frontiers in Electromagnetic Non Destructive Evaluation Research (FENDER)

The detection and characterisation of damage, material properties and foreign objects by Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) is crucial to society and throughout industry. These technologies underpin the safe operation of critical structures and equipment, which are essential to modern life. As industry undergoes a digital revolution, with greater use of robotics, lights-out manufacturing, flexible forming techniques and additive manufacturing, it must also meet the challenges to reach Net Zero through greater recycling of materials, reduction of waste and increase efficiency, all whilst maintaining a competitive advantage. In response, the NDE sector is innovating and adapting rapidly to address these changes. It is a key enabling technology which can allow industry to meet these often contradictory requirements. Within the suite of NDE sensing techniques, electromagnetics has an important role offering portable, non-contact, low-cost and rugged inspections. However, EM NDE is currently held back; industrial users often consider EM NDE to be only a qualitative, surface technique, which requires expert interpretation. The commercial view of EM NDE is of a technique which has not reached its potential and is hindered by complex theory and limited cross-over with technologies from other fields causing a lack of synergy and best practice between applications. Research into EM NDE evidences that this need not remain the case, and that there is a wealth of information which only EM NDE can unlock. Our ambition is to harness cutting-edge advances in electronics, signal processing, computational modelling and data science to put EM NDE at the heart of the Industry 4.0 revolution. EM NDE is poised to tackle forthcoming industrial challenges due to its applicability to complex geometries (in intricate additive manufactured parts), advanced materials (in composites and multi-materials) and new applications in the circular economy (where increased use is made of recycled material to minimise waste). FENDER aims to bring game changing technologies and ideas to exploit advances in complimentary areas of science, generating the opportunity to trigger a UK-led renaissance in EM NDE. This will galvanise and boost the UK’s already world-leading research community and achieve commercial impact via a broad network of industrial collaborators. FENDER’s overarching ambition is to develop scientifically led processes for EM sensor design and operation, and to demonstrate the capabilities and impact of the potential promised by EM technologies within future cutting-edge industries. The programme objectives are to deliver: A science-over-preference understanding and process for the critical design and operation of optimised EM sensing technologies. Next generation sensor fabrication techniques enhancing their flexibility, adaptability and operation in extreme environments. Innovative electronic advances allowing fully digital operation and unprecedented levels of real-time spatial and spectral data. World-leading modelling techniques, leveraging access to the UK’s advanced computational resources, to enable high-fidelity simulations for real-time inversion, machine learning training data and digital twinning. Impact driven non-contact automated inspection technologies fully integrated with robotic platforms and consolidated into manufacturing processes to enhance productivity. Fully deployable AI and ML algorithms for real-time quantitative solutions to the data interpretation problem.