It is September 1945, the war is over and Germany is finally defeated, it was militarily occupied by the allied armies, dividing the territory into four autonomous occupation zones, under the unified command of an Allied Control Council. The initial plan was to reunify the country, but the growing tension between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) in the framework of the Cold War caused the economy and production of that country to decrease every day. In 1946, the closure of the university continues and some of them remain in ruins, such as: the University of Cologne, where two brothers, one of them a professor and the other a student, decided to start a business setting up a workshop to repair of electrical appliances.
They rented a garage and put up a sign saying “Dr. Josef and Herbert Krautkrämer, Electrophysics Company” for the repair and development of all kinds of physical measurement instruments. However, since they did not receive work requests, they decided to close the workshop.
The Krupp-WIDIA company contacts the brothers and proposes that they develop a non-destructive testing method that will reduce the rejection rate of their products. The project was simple; but it wasn’t easy. These were metal carbide drawing dies that, in many cases, had holes and pores just below the surface of the material. As these defects were not revealed until the grinding process, the work was not economically profitable and was a great loss of time. How is it possible to detect such material defects before any further processing of the components? The most appropriate technique at that time was to perform X-ray analysis; however, it was not the most suitable method due to the cost of its application, and the largest accumulation of pores could not be detected. This was a challenge for the Krautkrämer physicists, and their response was the development of an ultrasonic instrument that operates according to the continuous transmission method, a principle that, although already described in some scientific publications at the time, had not yet been applied with success under field conditions. However, it worked, but the tests were taking too long and they demanded better performance. That was just the beginning in ultrasound, because the real advance of his research was yet to come.
The Krautkrämer were developing more equipment and improving techniques. In the year 1949, they discovered the fascinating world of echoes as they further expanded their ideas and finally built a flaw detector; in which the ultrasonic signals transmitted to the component are displayed on an oscilloscope screen. In August 1949, a meeting of the Verein Deutscher Eisenhüttenleute (Association of German Ironworkers) was held in Düsseldorf, where they presented their advanced ultrasonic flaw detector, the first German instrument of its kind and a typical “Krautkrämer product” with all the fragments and pieces, that is, with all the characteristics that point the way forward for the subsequent process, that is: “high sensitivity, high resolution, visualization of defects that measure only one millimeter to a depth of less than ten millimeters ( radio frequency display with a range of 50 millimeters), pulse repetition frequency of up to 1000 Hertz and portable, weighing around 20 kilograms”. In 1949, the first Krautkrämer ultrasonic flaw detectors were developed.
Currently, the progress of these teams is in line with the development of other technologies. For example, the latest from Krautkrämer is the USM 100, a device that provides ultrasound testing experts with unprecedented ease of use, with a modern, intuitive interface and smartphone-like function. Its 7” high-resolution LCD screen is touchscreen, and can be used with gloves under any weather and lighting conditions. Its low weight further contributes to its well-balanced ergonomics, and even the records of the measurements made in the field can be transmitted directly from the equipment via the internet to the cloud and sent to the corresponding inspection report database.
There is also the Mentor Flex, a new equipment for visual inspection whose benefits are summarized in the precision and accuracy of the measurements and which allows the verification of the inspection result to be consolidated, with a standardized process and an extraordinary ease of evaluation.
Bibliographic references: https://www.testekndt.net/la-historia-de-krautkramer-y-como-empezo-todo/
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