PearlStreet Ltd Australia Purchase Silverwing RMS 600
PearlStreet Ltd based in Welshpool near Perth in Western Australia have purchased an RMS system with the RMS 600 scanning head to replace their old C-scan system which has come to the end of it’s economic working life.
Geoff Williams approached Silverwing UK Ltd based on his experience with their range of Magnetic Flux Leakage Inspection tools. He said “we know from our experience with the MFL floor scanners that Silverwing produce high quality, robust equipment which is sensibly priced”. Historical evidence however did not prevent PearlStreet from stating that the RMS had to detect all defects in a test sample if we were to get the order. Rather than taking a demonstration system to Australia, Silverwing manufactured a half size test sample at their premises in Swansea and carried out the test in the UK.
Geoff had been expecting the inspection resolution to have to be set to 1mm x 1mm to detect the smallest defect however with the use of a focussed transducer and Silverwing’s unique “dynamic peak detection” filter the RMS was able to detect the smallest defect a 2mm diameter hole 5 mm deep in a 35 mm thick piece of carbon steel while using a 2mm x 2mm resolution and at a 500 mm scanning speed.
n order to assist PearlStreet in meeting anticipated inspection contracts, Silverwing managed to reduce the manufacturing schedule and the RMS was dispatched at the end of August. Neil Pearson, who was responsible for the software design flew to Perth on the 8th of September and carried out a 2 day training course for 6 PearlStreet technicians. All the technicians agreed that the system was easy to use, the software operation very intuitive and the hardware robust enough to stand the rigours of life in the Australian NDT market. As part of the training Geoff Williams asked that the RMS test a “real life” sample of an exchanger shell that was suffering from hydrogen blistering to see if the resolution was as good as that achieved on a test plate.
As can be seen below the RMS was up to the challenge and produced a high quality high definition C-scan image without any special cleaning of the sample surface.