Public Funding for Ferroday Limited

The life cycle of composite material products can include the manufacture and testing of starter products, the design and testing of the main product, the testing of the structural integrity of the product in the operational phase and the management of the disposal stage of the product at the end of life. Digital data at each stage of this life-cycle is generated by different processes, by different actors using different software and recording methods. Data can be lost at each stage, which presents difficulties from a shortage of relevant information if problems arise in the later stages. The study will investigate the feasibility of using new information models in the ISO Standards for digital product data representation and exchange to consolidate property data from different sources and different stages in the life of a composite product into one verifiable source and provide an audit trail for the origins of all of this data over its life cycle. The ISO standards provide open information models for the digital representation of engineering data independent from proprietary software. They support interoperability between different software systems and quality control and assurance for the information.

5The investigation will study the feasibility of importing an ICT method from aerospace and automotive and applying it to the representation of data from phased array ultrasonic testing for defects in fabricated components in nuclear plant. This method uses standardised information models for the computer representation of engineering data that are independent from proprietary software in order to support interoperability between different engineering systems. The study will be the first time that this technology has been used anywhere for the representation of NDT data. The study will investigate whether the information model defined in ISO 10303-235 can represent the component data together with the instrumental conditions and the size and location of defects and whether new software developed by Ferroday Ltd to implement the standard can be used to support this new application of the technology. Success will also provide an specification to support procedures for engineering quality control and quality assurance for the reported results and enable data to be conserved to compare with future tests over the component's lifetime.