Alex Haig
Email: se05agh@brunel.ac.uk
Office: TWI Ltd., Granta Park, Great Abington, Cambridge, CB21 6Al
PhD Supervisor: Prof Wamadeva Balachandran
Research Area: Ultrasonic Guided Waves for Non-Destructive Testing
Sponsoring Organization: TWI Ltd.
Academic Qualification :
- MSc Advanced Computer Science, University of East Anglia, 2005
- BSc Hons Computer Science, University of Essex, 2004
Research Interests:
Alex Haig is currently employed at TWI Ltd. (his EngD sponsor company) and is in the process of completing his EngD thesis at the same time.
His current research interests include many areas of Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), although most of his work is in area of using Ultrasonic Guided Waves (UGWs) for the inspection or Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of large structures such as wind turbine towers, wind turbine blades, off shore structures, air craft components, ship hulls and storage compartments, oil and gas pipelines, mooring chains, bridge cables, heat exchangers for power, and heat exchangers and pipelines for food production plants.
He is involved with all areas of procedure development including: wave mode analysis, transducer selection/development, array design, transmission and reception procedure, signal processing, feature (defect) classification, data display, and reporting.
EndD Research:
This work follows in three sections:
- The assessment of Macro Fibre Composite (MFC) transducers for use with Long Range Ultrasonic Testing (LRUT).
- The development of generic criteria for the optimal design of MFC transducer arrays for LRUT.
- The development of schemes of data collection and data processing for improved LRUT.
The transducers used in LRUT are frequently monopolar devices with uniform action (sensitivity/actuation) across their contact surface, although some transducers differ. One differing example is the MFC transducer, which has previously been used to generate and receive ultrasonic guided waves. These are of an in-plane, extensional type that exhibit bipolar (non-uniform) action. Their novel design offers improvements in ultrasonic performance when used in arrays with comparison to the more generally used monolithic transducers. However, there nature also introduces complexity that makes optimal application difficult to achieve.
Through their characterisation and evaluation, this work has aimed at overcoming this. Further work has considered other improvements in the inspection procedure that can complement an improved array. These improvements include the development of a robust calibration technique and the use of Full Matrix Capture (FMC) for data collection and improved focusing results.
Conference Publications:
- Haig, A.; Mudge, P.; Catton, P.; Balachandran, W., 2010, "Portable Ultrasonic Guided Wave Inspection with Macro Fiber Composite Actuators", REVIEW OF PROGRESS IN QUANTITATIVE NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION VOLUME 29. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 1211, pp. 1820-1827 (2010).
- P. Catton, A. Haig, R. Sanderson, P. Mudge, and W. Balachandran, 2010, “Enhanced Signal Processing and Characterization Using Guided Waves”, REVIEW OF PROGRESS IN QUANTITATIVE NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION VOLUME 29. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 1211, pp. 607-614 (2010).
- A. Haig, W. Balachandran, P. J. Mudge, T-H.Gan, 2007, "Advanced transducer development for Long Range Ultrasonic inspection systems", Fourth International Conference on Emerging Technologies in Non-Destructive Testing, Stuttgart, Germany, 2-4 April 2007.
