With new director and only NDE minor in the country, Center for Nondestructive Evaluation looks to the future

“I think of nondestructive evaluation professionals like the offensive line of a football team,” says Joseph Turner, the new director of the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation. “When NDE engineers do their job, you don’t even notice them. But when there is a breakdown, and the quarterback gets sacked, then you notice. The job of NDE is to make sure things do not fail and that components are manufactured correctly, all in the name of safety.”

And the stakes for what the field of NDE protects are much higher than on the gridiron. The industry’s techniques find and measure problematic issues in a wide variety of materials and products that can lead to catastrophic events.

Center combines engineering disciplines

“I’m very excited to join this unique gem at Iowa State University,” says Turner. He became director of the CNDE and joined Iowa State as a professor of aerospace engineering and the Kirby Gray (Battelle) Chair in Engineering.

This “gem” is the only university-operated NDE facility in America that offers specific, comprehensive educational programs. Students and faculty members from many of Iowa State’s engineering departments, including aerospace engineering, electrical and computer engineering, materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, and civil, construction and environmental engineering, all conduct research in the CNDE.

Iowa State is also the only university in the United States that offers an undergraduate minor in NDE, and it includes opportunities for students to engage in meaningful, hands-on lab work.

“David Eisenmann, an associate teaching professor in MSE, has been leading the undergrad minor program and it has just been growing phenomenally,” says Turner.

Trent Moritz, who recently earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, spent a great deal of time in CNDE as an undergrad and graduate student.

“The tools you get to work with are amazing,” he says. Moritz participated in an undergraduate internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his CNDE experience caught attention. “It was a case of ‘Oh, you’ve actually used some of this equipment?’ It turns out the stuff I was using almost every day at CNDE were things few students have much actual experience with, so they were very impressed.”

Moritz, who was recently hired for a job with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, says he values his time in CNDE, and his advice to students is “go into the NDE minor and get involved with research as an undergrad. The experience you get is a massive help for internships and future employment.”

Exploring new horizons in safety

Turner comes to Iowa State after 28 years with the engineering faculty at University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He replaces the retiring Reza Zoughi, professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Turner says CNDE is always looking for new and better ways to perform its services and one area where he is expecting to see expansion is in the use of AI in testing.

“One of the strengths we have is modeling (the process of creating physical, conceptual, or mathematical representations to understand, explain, and predict complex, real-world phenomena) and with AI you want to ensure that it is doing the job it is supposed to with our work. We must ask, ‘where do we fit into this picture of using AI for inspections?’”

CNDE scientists, faculty members, engineers and students also ensure they are at the forefront by working closely with the center’s Industrial Advisory Board. The center also works with non-member companies that approach them for a variety of research projects.

CNDE was launched in 1985 as an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Although CNDE has now “graduated” from the IUCRC program, it continues to follow the principles of that successful NSF program.