The Trappist Project - a European distributed NDE system
Main Objectives
The relationship between NDT and telecommunications is not an obvious one, and almost four years ago
when the Trappist project was launched, it found itself to be the only representative of this domain
within the RACE II framework, a European fund to promote advanced communications within Europe.
The project name fully describes the objectives: Trappist is an acronym for Transfer, Processing and
Interpretation of 3D NDT Data in a Standard Environment. The project started in 1992 with the
objective to deliver within three years a working prototype of a distributed nondestructive
evaluation system, enabling researchers throughout Europe to share data, algorithms and results in a
unique effort to enable three-dimensional evaluation of NDT data. Among the participants were EDF,
France, BAM, Germany, Force, Denmark, University of Strathclyde, UK, VTT, Finnland, Lufthansa and
Deutsche Airbus, Germany, the whole project being managed by a DeTeBerkom, a daughter company of
Deutsche Telekom.
The initially targeted ATM infrastructure not having been widely available at that time, nor the
alternatively considered ISDN working as flawlessly as promised, the ubiquitous Internet served as a
means to both facilitate the distributed development as well as providing a reliable albeit slow
network to test the evolving scenarios, although the data volumes had to be scaled down to enable
reasonable transfer times.
The project ended by 1994, but the Internet is still serving the former partners in their effort to
distribute the results to a wider audience. Information about one of the higher-impacting results, a
standard format for NDT data exchange, is available since October 1994 at this WWW-server,
with libraries and test data at the disposal of the NDT community.
Major updates as well as a french mirror site are envisaged,
and subscription to an email list concerning the ongoing activities of the CEN TC138 AHG 3 standard format
normalization group is possible from within the WWW site. A constantly updated comprehensive online
documentation of the current standard format access library is maintained, along with an extensive
and still growing list of related sites.
Technical Approach
To achieve the main objectives, the following technical approach was
realized :
- A study of the various factors which affect the acceptance of combined
3D NDT, taking into account the different European quality standards,
different industries and state-of-the-art in testing and
telecommunications.
- Specification and realization of a functional demonstration system which
produces a better quality of NDT through the combination of data
sources (test systems) which are located in different countries.
- Installation of telecommunications links between several national test
centers to provide remote expertise, remote cooperation and
joint viewing to give full functionality for visualization and
interpretation at each side's workstation.
- Application of the demonstration system to several typical inspection
tasks from different industries to encourage the acceptance
for combined decentralized test systems.
- Standardization of the data formats and transform coordinate systems
for 3D-data coming from different physical test methods.
- Validation of the demonstration system and its application to give
recommendations for a wide range of future 3D-tasks in industry.
Key issues
- Definition and use of a general standard format for 3D NDT data.
- Setup of prototypes with additional capabilities for the communication,
combined processing and visualization.
- Open computer environment for different industrial country
scenarios.
- Remote expertise through combination of knowledge from different
sources and even different European locations.
- Remote cooperation by means of online communications between
experts.
- Joint viewing with the help of joint presentation and interpretation
of data in an environment which may be called Defect
Indication by Computer Assistance (DICA).
Achievements
This application should demonstrate different NDT methods, allowing
the exchange and development of defect classification methods. This
in turn requires that delivery of multimedia information (text, 3D
data, still images, animations) be achieved, to support the different
NDT methods in use.
Expected Impact
This application pilot increases the market awareness of the benefit
to be gained by the integration of several methods quality insurance
processes by means of telecommunication. This will impact mainly on
inspection methods utilising large amounts of 3D data, at geographically
separated locations. Major applications are to be found in safety
sensitive areas such as the nuclear, transport and aircraft industries,
though companies with distributed manufactoring and inspection facilities
ties can also save time and transport expenses through online communication.
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