HOIS project presented at prestigious reliability workshop

Dr Martin Wall recently presented the HOIS Human Factors project at the prestigious 7th European-American Reliability Workshop. His paper was entitled “Human factors guidance to improve reliability of non-destructive testing in the offshore oil and gas industry.” His paper is available here for download.

One of the aims of this HOIS project is to raise awareness of the influence of human factors on the effectiveness and reliability of inspections in the oil and gas industry. This project identified the “dirty dozen” key human factors in offshore inspection and has since been developing general guidance on mitigation of these factors and more specific guidance for internal visual inspection, external visual inspection for corrosion and manual ultrasonics. Simple step-by-step graphical approaches have been developed using “bow-tie” plots to show the key human factors effects and mitigation possible at each stage in an offshore inspection workscope.

Martin was also a joint author on a second paper in collaboration with TWI, University of Bristol and DSTL entitled “Development of a protocol for acceptance of new NDT capability in the air domain”. Martin has been developing a new skeleton protocol for model assisted qualification for inspections in the military air domain. The established route for qualification of new non-destructive testing techniques is a probability of detection (POD) trial; these are often costly and time-consuming as they require a large sample of realistic defect specimens. The primary focus of the protocol is to reduce the cost of probability of detection studies by using physics based models to reduce the number of samples.