Posted on: September 15, 2014
Ten years ago, non-contact ultrasound (NCU) was an obscure and nascent technology, unknown to virtually all testing experts. Today, it is quickly growing in adoption as more and more industry professionals are looking for competitive quality control solutions. With increasing knowledge about the realities of NCU, we have found a number of companies interested in our products across a variety of industry applications. As such, our business is increasingly moving towards providing production quality control solutions. For us, this presents a shift. Our efforts are becoming more focused upon delivering high-throughput quality control products.
While ultrasound has been widely used for decades, it has been underrepresented as a testing technique for in-process quality control due to traditional limitations, such as the requirement of contact or liquid coupling. As a result, few engineering solutions, powered by ultrasound, are in existence for high throughput quality control. At Ultran, we have been focusing recent efforts upon building engineering solutions, applicable to multiple industries, with minimal customization required. Delivering our first set of 24/7 in-process testing systems in 2012, we are now deploying tens of such systems for continuous quality inspection. For a company, which innovated transducer technology over decades, this presents our biggest step yet towards bringing NCU into the mainstream of production quality control.
Such advancements do not come easy, as we have had to overcome challenging engineering issues and develop products beyond the traditional ultrasound solutions. However, the increasing awareness and desire for methods of safely inspecting internal material properties for 100% quality control is bringing NCU into the forefront of inspection techniques. We are ever aware that there will be obstacles with any new and fast-growing technology, but so far it’s been a lot of fun.
-Anuj Bhardwaj,
President, The Ultran Group
