RR617 Programme for the assessment of NDT in industry. PANI 3
This report describes the work undertaken and the results obtained during the 3rd project under Health and Safety Executive's Programme for the Assessment of NDT in Industry (PANI 3). The project was instigated with the objective of identifying solutions which will allow industry to optimise performance and minimise the magnitude of operator variation in the application of manual ultrasonic inspections. The PANI 3 project was managed on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive by Serco's Inspection Validation Centre (IVC). In order to keep the report easy to read and assimilate, the main text gives the key information and the reader is referred to the Appendices for the supporting detail.
The project comprised of an investigation into the human factors aspects of the manual ultrasonic task and an assessment of the organisation of NDT and the NDT process (initially referred to as QA Assessment). Following a data gathering exercise which is reported in Appendix 2, experimental work was performed with the twin objectives of investigating the operators' decision making processes and the correlation of ultrasonic performance with the operators' scores on ability tests and a number of personality scales.
The assessment of the organisation of NDT was conducted through eliciting information from operators and NDT vendor companies and reviews of previous reliability studies and other initiatives to improve NDT reliability.
This report and the work it describes were funded by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Its contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect HSE policy.
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