About the World Federation
of NDEThe World
Federation of Nondestructive Evaluation Centers was founded at
an international meeting held in Snowbird, Utah, in July 1998.
Founding members include leading NDE research centers in
Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, China, India, Korea, Russia, South
Africa, Ukraine, and the United States with a permanent
secretariat at Iowa State University. As a part of the
formation of the World Federation, a Memorandum of Understanding
was developed which has now been signed by the director at each
of the 14 founding centers and a senior administrator (generally
at the level of Provost) at their home institutions.
The motivation for the formation of the World Federation
is to improve NDE technology and its uniform application on a
worldwide scale. A number of global drivers, each with
significant impact on the quality of life, contribute to this
motivation. Included are demands fostered by population growth,
environmental concerns, economic competition, and easing of
world tensions.
One consequence of these drivers has been the increased
globalization of industrial production, which raises NDE
challenges associated with maintaining quality, safety, and
reliability while minimizing life-cycle costs. These issues are
found in areas as diverse as manufacturing, energy, electronics,
infrastructure, communications, transportation, and mining. An
additional opportunity is the application of the noninvasive
measurement procedures developed by the NDE community to related
fields such as medical diagnostics and precision agriculture.
The members of the World Federation are motivated to find
cost-effective ways to pursue precompetitive, cooperative NDE
research in support of these and related endeavors, and to
pursue opportunities for exchange of faculty, students, and
other scientific personnel. Both will improve the overall
technical infrastructure of the involved countries.
It is the vision of the founding members of the World
Federation to provide significant leverage in meeting the
growing needs of a global economy. In order to gain these
advantages, focus is to be placed on the following objectives:
- The selection and performance
of highly leveraged, collaborative quantitative NDE research
projects and applications that lead to excellence and improved
cost effectiveness in global NDE engineering practice.
- The exchange of faculty,
researchers and students among cooperating centers.
- The development of educational
and training materials.
- The pursuit of outreach
programs with national and international industry groups for
promoting worldwide safety, product quality and economic well
being of people.
- The extension of measurement
science and technology developed in the NDE field to
application areas such as agriculture.
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