Newport News Shipbuilding Hosts Digital Radiography Workshop

Digital Radiography Transition for Welds & Castings

The Digital Radiography (DR) Transition for Inspection of Welds and Castings project team hosted their first Task Group meeting and Workshop April 13-14, 2011 at Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS), a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, in Newport News, VA.  The event was well attended with representatives from both private and public shipyards, SUPSHIP Newport News, NAVSEA 05 and NAVSEA 08.  The group was given an update on the status of the current developments with DR at NNS including a review of their weld school and production pipe images.  The attendees also discussed their own developments, issues, questions and concerns.  Three DR workstations (two Fuji and one GE) were available and the attendees had the opportunity to use the workstations to compare DR with traditional x-ray images. 

The purpose of the Task Group and these workshops is to provide input to the continued development of digital radiography standards and gain early awareness of progress that is being made.  They will meet periodically and be involved in another major workshop hosted by NNS in March 2012.  The involvement of this Task Group will ultimately help to ensure that Navy requirements are being met throughout the project- thus improving the rate of acceptance and implementation of this technology for the Navy’s use. 

Digital Radiography Transition for Inspection of Welds and Castings is an ONR ManTech funded effort managed by CNST and NNS. The project kicked off in November 2010 to continue the development of state-of-the-art computed radiography capabilities.  The team is working to ascertain inspection confidence with isotopes and high energy applications in addition to resolving technical and implementation issues that will lead to full implementation.  Once fully implemented, it is estimated that this project will result in a cost savings of approximately $1M per CVN.