Michelle: So, can you tell our listeners how you first got involved with NDE 4.0?

Dr. Vrana: Where to start? I was always very interested, number one in technology and number two in computers. That is something going back to my days being a child. And so, I studied physics and it was always computers, all around me. And then somewhere, and I guess that was somewhere in 2014, I got into a project where we used the eData to enhance the fracture mechanics of some components.

And within that project, we were able, just by using NDE data, which we already had captured on the decades before, to actually increase the lifetime of the components by about a factor of two. Without changing the material, without changing the design, without changing anything, just by using the inspection results we have. And that was the moment it dawned on me that there has to be more value to NDE data than just using giga or collecting gigabytes of data and then converting it down to a one bit decision. Can we use that component? Yes or no. So that was kind of my beginning and then kind of the formal step of where NDE 4.0 started. That was around 2017.

Norbert Meindorf gave a presentation where he used the term NDE 4.0 in Germany. Within the German Society for Non-Instructive Testing, they built a group for NDE 4.0. I became a member of that one in 2017. And then somewhere in 2018, I proposed to ASNT to do a session on NDE 4.0. Now that one session became actually a whole day of NDE 4.0, goodness. So, that was kind of the start.

Michelle: I saw, and liked, you had an article in 2020, you co-authored called NDE 4.0, why should I get on this bus now? It feels like that's probably a question people were asking, then and maybe now. Could you explain your argument there?

Dr. Vrana: Yeah, NDE 4.0, that's really, if we think about NDE and if we speak to our customers, some of our customers, luckily not all of them, will tell us NDE doesn't bring any value. We only sort out the parts which are, yeah, you only sort out parts. And usually most or some customers don't like NDE because they think we are just a cost center. We don't bring value to it. And I think by what I described before, this taking the NDE data, to improve the fracture mechanics is a typical example how NDE can actually bring value, can bring value to the customers.

But what we have to do is not just by taking one example or one component. No, by looking on the statistics, looking on the statistics of our results, on all the results we got over the decades, and we can give our customers a lot more value. So, this is for me, the main thing why people should get on the bus because we can change NDE from a cost center to a value center. That's reason number one. Reason number two, we can make the life for our inspectors easier. Now, I don't want to take away the job from the inspectors. It's more, I want to take away the things they don't like to do.