Robotics engineers who love ultrasound

Blades keep getting bigger, and checking them by hand has not kept up. A 100 m blade has more than a kilometre of glued joints, and nobody can run a probe along all of it in the time a production line allows.

So we build machines that do it instead. A gantry, a crawler or a scanner carries the probe along the blade at a steady speed, records exactly where it is, and saves the result against the blade’s serial number. The same blade can be checked again next year at the same points, and the two scans can be compared directly.

Our team comes from three backgrounds: machine design, ultrasound and software. An automated inspection line needs all three — the mechanics to move the probe, the physics to read the signal, and the software to keep the records straight.