The 29^th annual Review of Progress in Quantitative NDE was held at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, July 14-19, 2002.  The meeting brought together some 315 researchers, engineers, and students of NDE from academia, industry, and government.  Twenty-eight different countries were represented including members of the World Federation of NDE Centers, a global federation aimed at promoting global cooperation in NDE education and research.  The Review was hosted by the Center for NDE at Iowa State University with support provided by the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT), the Ames Laboratory U.S. Department of Energy, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-Langley Research Center, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

George O. Strawn, Assistant Director and Executive Officer, Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the National Science Foundation, provided the keynote address entitled, “Recent and Anticipated Advances in Scientific Computing”.  This is a subject of keen importance to NDE researchers and engineers, since these advances will open new horizons in data acquisition, processing, and interpretation.  Dr. Strawn presented a comprehensive survey of Information Technology (IT) that extended from a historical perspective extending well into the past to the far future.  Of particular interest to the scientific/engineering communities were his comments that addressed the broad aspects of future directions and availability of IT including computing, storage, telecommunications, sensors, and displays, and software.  Dr. Strawn noted that the Presidential IT Advisory Committee’s first three concerns in 1999 were “…software, software, and software”.  He also made some major predictions for the future—that by 2020 computers will reach the power of the brain, and that by 2100 we will need new laws for “ex-humans” who have “cyberized” themselves into a new species. 

The second plenary session focused on reviews of advances in two key topics.  In the first of these, Dr. Iris Altpeter, in collaboration with Dr. Gerd Dobmann, both from the well-known Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institutes (IZFP) at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, provided an excellent overview of current activities and new results concerning NDE of material degradation by embrittlement and fatigue.  Topics that were highlighted included an evaluation of the potential of electromagnetic techniques for characterization of material strength in ferrous materials (using an analogy between domain wall and dislocation movement), the suitability of micromagnetic NDE techniques for the characterization of the Vicker’s hardness as an indicator of embrittlement in fossil fuel plant steels, and the early detection of degradation and prediction of the remaining lifetime in austenitic stainless steels using new sensor techniques.  Dr. Peter Cawley of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College of London, presented the second plenary talk in this session entitled, “Practical Long Range Guided Wave Inspection-Managing Complexity”.  Dr. Cawley and his colleagues, global leaders in the research and application of guided ways as a quantitative NDE technique clearly demonstrated their mastery of this valuable tool in this talk.  Dr. Cawley noted that guided waves have a high potential for inspection in complex structures because they can be excited at one point and will propagate and return defect echoes from long distances thus avoiding complex scanning systems.  However, this capability also creates complexity in interpretation of results because of multiple paths, and defect echo returns, and other unwanted returns.  Dr. Cawley provided an excellent discussion of both the complexity and potential of guided wave testing using, as an example, the development of a guided wave testing system for long pipe and rail systems.

The technical programs that followed the opening plenary sessions consisted of both verbal and poster sessions.  Verbal sessions included both invited sessions organized around specific subjects as well as contributed sessions, organized around a broader scope of subjects.  Organized sessions included Microwave NDE, “Smart” Systems for Structural Health, Ultrasonic Arrays, Thermosonics (dual modality) and Thermal Wave Imaging, Acoustic Emission, Laser Ultrasonics and Applications, a memorial session for Dr. John (Jack) Lincoln on NDE Reliability and the Probability of Detection, and a special session on “Benchmark Problems”.  Although not reported in these volumes, the traditional Wednesday night “open line discussion session” was keyed on “Opportunities for NDE in Security Problems”.  This session was highlighted by presentations from Dr. Michael Stumborg, Naval Research Sciences Advisor, Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection, Dr. G. J. Posakony, PNNL, and Mr. Matt Golis, Wright Patterson Air Force Base.