Process monitoring, inspection and control

Addressing industrial challenges related to cost and quality through process monitoring, inspection, and control

Improving industrial competitiveness requires reducing production and operating costs, while maintaining quality and safety requirements. The Monitoring, Inspection and Process Control team responds to the following challenges:

• Reduce control costs in production and maintenance.
• Remove non-quality and avoid scrap.
• Accelerate process development and optimize the window of use.
• Detect drifts early and take into account product variability.
• Automate the inspection of complex and varied structures.
• Reduce analysis time and facilitate decision-making.
• Diagnose the state of health of structures to plan maintenance operations.
• Ensure the digital continuity of inspection operations.

Expertise in R&D for Monitoring, Inspection, and Process Control

To maximize the industrial impact of its R&D work, our team is building relationships with the professional and scientific community in the fields of monitoring, AI, and NDT.

Our R&D activities dedicated to monitoring, inspection and process control

Monitoring of manufacturing processes

The technology team instrumented the processes to monitor their key parameters. The data acquired makes it possible to better understand the behavior of processes, to optimize their operating window and to detect drifts.

The ultimate objective is to predict the quality of products at the end of production in order to limit NDT operations and alert the operator in the event of drifts. The key parameters monitored can also feed into process feedback loops to prevent these process drifts and ensure production quality. The analysis of these key process parameters also makes it possible to detect process wear and therefore to plan maintenance operations in a preventive manner to optimize production shutdown phases.

Automated and flexible non-destructive testing

The second line of research focuses on the development and industrialization of automated, flexible NDT resources adapted to complex and varied structures.

The work focuses on the development of more efficient and productive means while seeking to reduce CAPEX and inspection costs.

They cover the choice of control method, the design of effectors, the automation of inspection data acquisition, the implementation of restitution tools and the qualification of production resources. The solutions include ultrasound, airborne ultrasound, vision, active infrared thermography, eddy currents and 3D dimensional inspection.

Automatic analysis of inspection and monitoring data

IRT Jules Verne also develops solutions for automatic analysis of multimodal data from the various means of inspection (ultrasound, vision, infrared thermography, etc.) and monitoring (process sensors: temperature, pressure, heat flow, etc.).

The work focuses in particular on the detection, location and automatic characterization of anomalies on structures.

Artificial intelligence makes it possible, for example, to assist operators, reduce analysis times and improve the traceability of decisions.

Integrated health monitoring of structures

Integrated health monitoring, or SHM (structural health monitoring), consists of integrating sensors into structures or equipment to diagnose their state of health during use. This approach makes it possible to anticipate maintenance operations and thus optimize operating conditions.

At IRT Jules Verne, the team in charge of SHM selects the measurement technologies adapted to the desired defects and the operating constraints of the equipment or structures. It also develops the processes for integrating the sensors and processes the data collected to assess their state of health. The results obtained contribute to the estimation of the residual life of the instrumented equipment and structures.