CCI Pope

ACARP Funded Projects

C15031 - System for Dragline Rope Condition Monitoring

C16032 - Application of StressVision® Technology in Dragline Booms

C15031 - System for Dragline Rope Condition Monitoring

C13039 - In-situ Inspection of Dragline Boom Suspension Ropes

C12029 - Advanced signal processing tools for shafTest®


Postgraduate Research Projects

The University of Newcastle and the CCI Pope Product Development Centre have jointly been awarded an Australian Research Council - Strategic Partnerships with Industry - Research and Training (ARC-SPIRT) grant. This grant will support a PhD project, titled: Discrimination of echoes in computer based ultrasonic flaw detection for CAD modelled steel pieces. This project commenced in January 2002. To date, this project has produced 5 papers:

  1. K. Lee and V. Estivill-Castro "Classification of Ultrasonic Shaft Inspection Data Using Discrete Wavelet Transform"
    The Third IASTED International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Applications (AIA 2003) September 8-10, 2003 Benalmdena, Spain. Hamza, M.H. (ed.) ACTA Press pages 673-678. ISBN 0-88986-890-3, ISSN 1482-7913.
  2. K. Lee and V. Estivill-Castro "Feature Extraction Techniques for Ultrasonic Shaft Signal Classification"
    Third International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS03). Melbourne, Australia. Abraham, A., Koppen, M. and Franke K. (editors) IOS Press (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) pages 479-488 ISBN 1-58603-394-8.
  3. K. Lee and V. Estivill-Castro "Support Vector Machine Classification of Ultrasonic Shaft Inspection Data using Discrete Wavelet Transform"
    The 2004 International Conference on Machine Learning;Models, Technologies and Applications (MLMTA'04) June 21-24, 2004, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
  4. K. Lee and V. Estivill-Castro "A Hybrid Classification Approach to Ultrasonic Shaft Signals"
    The 17th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AusAI) Dec. 6 10, 2004, Cairns, Australia, Geoffrey I.Webb and Xinghuo Yu (editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol3339/2004, Springer-Verlag. Pages 284-295, ISBN 3-540-24059-4.
  5. K. Lee and V. Estivill-Castro "Classification Ensembles for Shaft Test Data: Empirical Evaluation."
    The 4th International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent System (HIS), Dec. 5 8, 2004, Kitakyushu, Japan, IEEE Computer Society. (In press)

Artificial Intelligence Applied to Ultrasonic Testing of Shafts

The commercial shafTest® system started out as an ACARP funded research project to develop an improved method of ultrasonically testing large shafts and pins. The shafTest® system utilizes a novel approach to the collection and presentation of ultrasonic shaft defect information. In this way the normally complex task of monitoring the condition of large shafts and pins is not only simplified but also made more accurate and reproducible. The system now allows us to provide a much-improved ultrasonic inspection service.

In 2001 we additionally completed an extension project funded by ACARP to research the feasibility of using artificial intelligence techniques to automatically analyse and discriminate different types of echoes from within the ultrasonic signature of a shaft. In particular, we have shown that it is possible using neural networks to identify mode-converted echoes, and discriminate between different types of reflectors, i.e. cracks, from their characteristic ultrasonic signatures. This result is a world first and we believe that an ultrasonic flaw detector that can aid the operator by indicating the position of defects from a complex ultrasonic trace is realisable.


Newcastle University
University of Newcastle

CCI Pope enjoys a strong relationship with science and engineering departments of The University of Newcastle. Through this association we benefit both from opportunities for education and training, we gain access to academic expertise supporting our research interests and we are able to satisfy our commitment to our community by supporting the training and professional development of undergraduate engineers.

Sponsored Undergraduate Projects

Accelerometer Calibration System
William Van De Linde
Dept. of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Newcastle University, 2006.

AI Based Classification of Ultrasound Reflection Data
Heath Raftery
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Newcastle University, 2004.

Portable Solution for the Storage and Analysis of Broad Spectrum Vibration Data.
James Palmowski.
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Newcastle University, 2001.
One of four final year projects (of over 40) short listed in competition for the Australian Institute of Engineers award for project excellence.

Applying Artificial Neural Networks To The Ultrasonic Testing Of Shafts
John Perceval.
Dept. of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Newcastle University, 2000.

EMAT Pipe Weld Test
Luke Hellowell & Adam Van Dyck.
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Newcastle University, 1999.