KEYNOTE AND PLENARY SPEAKERS ANNOUNCED FOR QNDE 2008
and
INFORMATION REGARDING THE SHORT COURSE ON QNDE FOR PIPES

The 35th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation will be held at the Forum, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), July 20-25, 2008. As is customary for this meeting, a broad scope of papers that detail research advances in all aspects of quantitative NDE will be presented in both verbal and poster sessions. The Review is also pleased to present the sixth annual Student Poster Competition, a competition that was initiated to encourage student participation in the evolving NDE disciplines. A spouse/guest program is also planned. Papers presented at the Review will be published in the Proceedings of the Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation. The Review is organized by the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation at Iowa State University and sponsored by QNDE Programs with welcome assistance from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the American Society of Nondestructive Testing (ASNT), the Ames Laboratory of the Department of Energy, the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Center. 

Preceding the Review, the World Federation of NDE Research Centers will sponsor an important, comprehensive short course entitled “Quantitative NDE for Pipes”, July 19-20, at the same location as the Review. This short course has been organized by Dr. George A. Alers, a well known expert in the area. The purpose of this short course is to assemble users of metal tubular products and expert practitioners of NDE techniques to discuss new methods and code requirements for quality assurance of piping in the gas and oil transmission business, in chemical processing, in heat exchangers, and in fabrication mills. Details of this short course and registration information can be found at www.wfndec.org/2008/meetings.htm.

The Conference keynote lecture will be delivered on Monday morning, July 21, by Professor Jan Achenbach, Walter P. Murphy and Distinguished McCormick School Professor in the Departments of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University and Founding Director of the Center for Quality Engineering and Failure Prevention. Professor Achenbach is very well known in the QNDE research community. He received his undergraduate degree in aeronautical engineering from Delft University in the Netherlands and his doctorate from Stanford University, and joined the Northwestern University faculty in 1963. Professor Achenbach was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Technology in 2003 and the National Medal of Science in 2005. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of many other engineering and scientific organizations. He has also been awarded the Timoshenko Medal and the William Prager Medal. Professor Achenbach’s research has been concerned with the propagation of mechanical disturbances in solids with applications to solid mechanics, materials engineering, earthquake mechanisms, and ultrasonics. He has developed methods for quantitative non-destructive evaluation and structural health monitoring of aircraft and other safety critical structures. In his lecture, entitled “From NDE with a Q to SHM and Beyond”, Professor Achenbach will highlight the beginnings of QNDE with a discussion of the limitations of NDI and NDE that became apparent with the advent of fracture mechanics and the DARPA/AFML Program that provided the point of departure for the journey to put the Q with NDE. This program, and subsequent DOD, FAA, NIST, and industrial programs, produced seminal results for diagnostics and prognostics. New results in QNDE naturally led to structural health monitoring (SHM), whereby sensors are permanently installed on structures, Professor Achenbach will also review this development. Data processing, materials engineering and solid mechanics play dominant roles in both the diagnostic and the prognostic components of SHM. A probabilistic approach is essential, as will be shown by examples of pre-crack fatigue damage, crack growth and optimization of an inspection schedule. Professor Achenbach’s many contributions have been important in the evolution of QNDE; his summaries of technical highlights and future directions should be of interest to all.

Two plenary lectures will follow the keynote. In the first of these, Dr. John Cantrell of NASA Langley will discuss work in nonlinear acoustics, a subject in which he is eminently qualified and to which he has contributed much. Dr. Cantrell is a senior materials physicist in the Nondestructive Evaluation Sciences Branch at NASA Langley Research Center. He received the B.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and the M.A. from Cambridge University, all in physics before joining NASA Langley Research Center in 1977. He received the NASA Langley H. J. E. Reid Award in 1986 and 2006 and was awarded the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1988, the Federal Laboratory Consortium Award in 1990, and was three times selected as Langley Research Center Inventor of the Year (1993, 1994, and 1998). In 1994 he received a Commending Resolution from the Virginia General Assembly, and was a Winston Churchill Foundation Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, (1988-89, 1993-94), and a Bye Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge University, in 1992. Dr. Cantrell is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Acoustical Society of America, and is a Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London). His research focus has been on the nonlinear interaction of sound waves with material microstructures. Dr. Cantrell’s lecture will discuss nonlinear acoustics as a tool to assess the state of fatigue of wavy slip metals from the virgin state to fracture and salient features of an analytical model that account for the microelastic-plastic nonlinearities resulting from the interaction of an acoustic wave with dislocation substructures and cracks that evolve during cyclic straining. The interaction is quantified by the material (acoustic) nonlinearity parameter extracted from acoustic harmonic generation measurements. Application of the model to aluminum alloy 2024-T4 and 410CB stainless steel specimens fatigued in stress-controlled loading yields excellent agreement between theory and experiment. Current applications and future prospects of nonlinear acoustics for fatigue damage assessment and materials state monitoring are discussed.

Dr. Francesco Simonetti will provide the second plenary lecture. Dr. Simonetti is an outstanding young engineer who won the first QNDE student poster session prize in 2003 while still a student at Imperial College where he received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2004. After working as Research Associate for the NDT group at Imperial, in August 2005 he was awarded a research fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC. Dr. Simonetti is a Faculty Associate of the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he spent several months after graduation. In his lecture, he will introduce the notion that ultrasonic measurements encode more information about the object’s structure than beamforming can extract. The key to unlock this information is provided by the knowledge of the scattering mechanism that has caused the encoding in the first instance. This leads to a modern imaging strategy that goes beyond beamforming, can achieve subwavelength resolution and shares some of the underpinning physics with near field microscopy - known to break the Rayleigh criterion. These arguments are supported by experimental images showing unprecedented subwavelength resolution and tomographic reconstructions of a complex 3-D breast phantom that exhibit striking similarities with X-ray CT. The talk will also provide a perspective on future directions and applications in NDE. 

The QNDE week following the keynote and plenary talks will be filled with technical presentations, a conference banquet, special events for spouses, and other events aimed at providing a pleasant time for attendees, spouses, and other guests. Approximately 350 papers will be presented in verbal and poster sessions. The verbal sessions include a number of sessions organized by specialists as well as sessions compiled from contributed papers. Organized sessions include eddy currents and probes, guided ultrasonic waves, ultrasonic phased arrays, air coupled ultrasonic transducers, thermography and thermosonics, teraherz imaging, materials microstructure, probability of detection, NDE for special armor construction, structural health monitoring, and benchmark problems. Other sessions will focus on signal/image processing, transducers and probes, NDE for materials deformation, engineered materials including composites, and many new applications and techniques. A Poster Session will include both the Student Poster Competition and contributed posters. A special session will be presented on Wednesday evening focussed on NDE infrastructure problems. 

A spouse program will be arranged to take advantage Chicago’s many amenities. Chicago is a city with sophistication mixed with Midwestern friendliness. It is a city known as the “capital of skyscrapers” and claims many of the world’s tallest buildings as well as world class museums of history, art, and science. It has a beautiful lakefront with expansive green space including the famous Millennium Park, world class shopping along the Magnificent Mile, and many world class restaurants. More details are available at http://www.choosechicago.com/Pages. 

The conference is designed to serve as a forum and interface for both researchers (including students) and practicing NDE engineers. It provides a friendly and conducive format for technical exchange between all concerned with the subject. This conference has been recognized as a world-leading research and engineering NDE conference and one of the most important conferences to attend. Pre-conference registration at a reduced rate is available until June 27. To view the preliminary programs and for more conference details go to the QNDE web site at www.cnde.iastate.edu/QNDE/QNDE/html or contact Heidi Long at heidil@iastate.edu

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