“Bureau Veritas innovates, thanks to Shaftest®, the maintenance of any plant”

Reliability of machinery and its critical components is essential to maintain the profitability of any plant. Profitability gets higher when one is able to increase the life of this equipment and its components with high associated costs, and it can be decisive in the evaluation of the operating performance of any plant.

The digital inspection system Shaftest® by Bureau Veritas helps to ensure that critical shafts and bolts are reliable, and helps to prolong their useful life, further improving plant safety by preventing breaks of this type of elements.

The conventional manual ultrasonic inspection has some disadvantages in the inspection of axles. Normally we only have access to the ends of the shafts to be inspected. In this situation of limited accessibility, the signals obtained by conventional ultrasound do not allow to determine with certainty whether the signals obtained are really defects or cracks. And the operator is who must interpret subjectively and determine if the inspected shaft has defects or not. Furthermore, conventional ultrasonic systems allow neither confirmation of key features of the axle geometry, nor to obtain a diagram of the inspected axle.

Shaftest® system allows removing doubts when inspecting rotation axles in situ with conventional ultrasonic. Unlike conventional systems, Shaftest® records exhaustively and automatically all data from the inspected axle, being only necessary to have access to at least one end. Thus, we obtain high quality data, layer by layer, allowing an objective assessment of the integrity of the inspected shaft by the software analysis of Shaftest®.

In addition, data obtained with Shaftest® is reproducible, as the system itself guides the ultrasound operator to obtain the data in the same way at each inspection. Shaftest® system records the data to compare in situ or in laboratory with previous tests data, leading into accurate predictions of the integrity of the axles, and allowing to extend the life cycle of axles. Thus, the replacement of axles can be programmed and performed safely and so, maximizing profitability.