Advanced NDT Best Practices with CICNDT’s Jeremy Heinks

Jeremy Heinks from CICNDT (Composite Inspection and Consulting NDT)
discusses how proper NDT programs can prevent costly failures and
improve blade reliability. Drawing from his extensive experience,
Heinks explains the challenges of implementing NDT in both onshore
and offshore wind environments, emphasizing the importance of
working with qualified experts to develop comprehensive inspection.
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show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind
Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my
co host, Joel Saxum today we're joined by Jeremy Heinks a true
veteran in the field of non destructive testing with over 25 years
of experience spanning aerospace, renewables, and the space
sectors. Jeremy is the owner of Composite Inspection and
Consulting, where he specializes in advanced materials, testing,
and inspection methods. And from inspecting rocket components at
SpaceX to developing comprehensive testing programs for wind
turbine blades, Jeremy brings a unique perspective on quality
assurance and testing methodologies. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight,
shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the
Progress Powering Tomorrow. Jeremy, welcome to the Uptime Wind
Energy Podcast. Thanks for having me. So you're a person we've been
wanting to talk to for quite a while. And I'm glad you're on the
podcast because NDT comes up all the time in our discussions when
we're talking to operators, when we're talking to owners, they
don't know much about it, and they're not even sure if they got NDT
data, if it's the right kind of data to help them, and you have a
ton of experience. You've done aerospace, you worked at SpaceX,
you've done all this cool NDT stuff. I want to know to start off
with. What happens in the factory? What kind of NDT should be
performed in the factory? And what are they trying to use it to
detect? Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. In the factory, NDT has come a long
way over the past 20 years or so but we start out with the basics
people don't understand like visual inspection is an NDT method and
making sure that, that's done in a proper manner, it's regulated.
There are rules and regulations for proper visual inspection. And
certifying people to that in the NDT realm, it's called VT here,
Visual Technic but, uh, that's a first just doing proper visual
inspection and looking for Gross defects that way. Another thing,
that's another really basic one that we see in the plants is a tap
test, right? And that's another one. Tap test is a regulated NDT
method. And typically that doesn't, people don't know that. It gets
done incorrectly. 99 percent of the time your technicians that are
doing tap tests have to pass certain certifications and regulations
for hearing and all these types of different things. And the same
with the conditions for the area to do the tap test. It can't be a
loud noisy area. You have to have, a certain amount of noise or
certain, and then we get into a couple of the other basics. One is
thermal testing or IR inspection. And when that's done in a plant,
it's typically after the blade has been closed we've put the mold
on top and we've closed up for the adhesive body to take place. And
the mold is then opened after curing cycle and then pulled out of
the out of the mold and set up. So typically we would do a thermal
inspection there to make sure that the adhesive is curing properly.
Typically if maybe you have an adhesive machine. that has issues.
It would you'd see, areas that didn't get the initiator or other
problems to where maybe you didn't get enough in there as a cooler
area. A lot of different things go on there. And that's a highly,
regulated inspection method as well. It can completely be done
improperly in the plant as as we see often. And another one that's
been pushed pretty far since the 2000s is ultrasonic inspection.
That started out with just a really basic single transducer with an
A scan squiggly line on a screen. And you're just looking for a
good bond between the laminate of the shell and a web and leading
and trailing edge as well. As far as bond lines go. You can also
use that and thermography for looking for dry glass. But we don't
typically see dry glass as much. That was a lot of the infusion
technology has come a long way, so we don't typically see dry glass
like we used to but and then, UT morphed into, using a linear array
with multiple elements, doing, being able to do a wider area at a
single pass again, all, mostly just aimed at bottom lines. Over the
years, we Also, a lot of the plants played with the root inspection
because, it's an important factor, there's a lot going on in the
root sections. But at the end of the day, it comes down to cycle
time and how much time you want a plant wants to give to the NDT
group if they have it. So those are the basics that we see in the
plant. Joel Saxum: I think it's important to touch on this is you
say, those are the basics, but anybody that's been close to NDT
understands that NDT is nothing close to anything basic in general,
right? It's very stringent. There's very, there's high regulation
on it. And the technology, like when you say, yes, the, an A scan,
it's just a squiggly line on the screen. It takes a lot of
education, a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience to, to really be
able to tell what these things are. And all of that is driven by
process. And one of the things to touch here to our listeners,
Jeremy here, CIC NDT, of course, he's also been the person that
worked in LM factories and built their NDT programs and has a ton
of experience here. Can you speak to what it looks like when
someone wants to build a program or what that looks like? Cause
you've been Oracle racing team, Tesla, fighter jets, all kinds of
crazy stuff you told us off air. Tell us what that, that, the
importance of that program and why someone would implement that.
Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, so the wind energy industry is still very much
the wild west when it comes to that type of stuff. So it's really
comes to what is the end user or the customer driving the
manufacturer to do. So a lot of it comes down to that. The other
thing is if the manufacturer just wants to take it upon themselves
to build a better system. Which we've seen in the past, but it
typically, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to stick. A customer
will have, a manufacturer will have a problem with a bomb mine. So
they'll spend a bunch of money. We go in, we set up a full bomb
mine inspection program for them, train inspectors get experience
up, mentor them. And then once the problem goes away, they seem to
think, oh yeah, we beat that. The process is now fixed. We have no
more problems. And then five years later, we go through the whole
thing again. But yeah we've built systems for a few of the blade
manufacturers and yeah, typically you're not going to go out and
hire certified NDT technicians. You'll get some, a group like my,
like CIC or you'll hire a single level three. And they'll come in
and build a system. And typically it'll just grab people from the
floor and toss them in a room and say, you're our NET group now.
And that's something on the aviation side, oil gas side that
doesn't happen. And that's, that makes you have to deal with a very
large learning curve, right? So these guys the upside is if you're
pulling them off a production line, they know the part. And that's.
Coming from the naval aviation side, that was something that we
were supposed to do too. It's before I could even become an NDT
technician in the Navy, I did five years working on aircraft as a,
Hydraulics and structural mechanics. So I knew the parts. I knew
the aircraft which just makes you a better inspector. Wow. Allen
Hall: All right. This is a little mind blowing here because it's
really complicated. I think that's one of the things about NDT that
I always complain about is don't know how difficult it is and
management doesn't tend to know doing an A scan is difficult. I.
Did that in aerospace and was around a lot of people who were
experts in it, and they could read things on that scope that I just
didn't see. And they, you're right, they also have to know what
they're looking at first. You just can't get a scan, a trace, and
go, Oh yeah, there's a defect here. That is not the case at all.
That's fascinating. So are we starting to see more sort of
automation in the factory? We, Joel and I have been to a couple of
conferences. Where they've talked about automating some NDT
inspections just for throughput, to keep the rate of deliveries up.
Is that where we're going to go in the factory, or is it still
really going to be a manual process because of the difficulties
with it? Jeremy Heinks: That's where we need to go. There's been a
few manufacturers that have tossed a ton of money at this problem.
The problem being that they threw the money at an automation
company that did not know NDT. So they came at it with a
manufacturing automation set of mind, mindset. And it, every time
I've seen it it failed pretty spectacularly with, they come up with
a solution, but it was just, wasn't practical. And you end up with
a million and a half dollar piece of equipment sitting on a shelf
or in a corner of your factory, just getting, collecting dust or
being scavenged off of. Tip, this is where it's going.