Cummins Turbo Technologies manufacture diesel turbo chargers, and have their worldwide engineering development facility based in the UK. An engineer at Cummins embarked on a project to detect defect in turbo charger castings by using eddy current technology to detect sub-surface cracks and defects by changes in eddy current intensity.

Cummins Turbo Charger

Metis Automation developed a system to measure voltages across an array of coils placed on the surface of a turbo charger blade, using a NI NI PXIe-5122 Digitizer Scope Card, and a NI PXIe-2532 512-Crosspoint Matrix (MUX) module to switch through the coil array.

Results of a scan of a turbo charger blade, with eddy current values displayed on a colour scale.

The system is currently in development at Cummins to determine the optimum parameters for fault detection within turbo charger blades.