Week 1

We are after the first session of work at laboratory. Unfortunately we have not completed all planned goals. There occurred some technical problems and we focused on solving them.

According to our plans from previous week, we have started from the review of available equipment. Details concerning this part will be given later in separated news. Be patient please. We have reorganized the measurement site to provide full comfort of work. Next week we plan to add here some photos to show you how it exactly looks like.

As it was mentioned we have not completed our plans for this week. The main reason of this situation was the problem with the software. Ultrasonic flaw detector CUD 10 (that we use) has an option to connect it with the computer via USB port. We tried to install necessary drivers in accord with the attached manual, but as it turned out the device and its software is compatible only with operating systems Windows XP and Windows 7. Ironically, the most of computers in our laboratory works with Windows Vista (the intermediate version of mentioned ones). Finally, after over two hours, we have found the computer which properly detects our ultrasonic device. It wasn’t so easy, because another PC with installed Windows XP also could not find our detector among its plug-in devices. We think that this problem was somehow related with Service Pack provided to operating system. The properly working computer is dedicated to exercise with gamma radiation. We need to exchange it. Of course it requires reinstall and copy all necessary software to another PC (to keep the site fully operative). This is the thing that we plan to deal with next week.

We wanted to launch the equipment and run first measurement. It didn’t happen because of the reasons described above. We hope that next time everything will go more efficiently. Meanwhile, we have downloaded up to date version of flaw detector manual.  It’s advisable to read it entirely for next session at lab. For this moment we know only the part, which is needed to use the ultrasonic device safely.

To sum up, we have realized:

• Organization of the measurement site
• Reading the manual (partly)
• Establishing the connection between the PC and ultrasonic device via USB

To do for next week:

• Swap the computers and copy all needed data
• Launch the equipment and run first measurements