The Hindu Business Line : A ‘Lucid’ effort

The phrase ‘non-destructive testing’ may sound like a toughie for most of us. “In the simplest form, all of us practise NDT in our everyday life as consumers,” says C.P. Madhusudan, Sales Director of Lucid Software Ltd, Chennai.

“When you buy tomatoes in the market and check if they are of the right colour, you are practising an NDT technique, viz. visual inspection. NDT comes into play wherever there exists a need for quality and safety,” he adds, picking up a piece of tomato from ‘sambhar’, during a recent interaction with eWorld over a quality working lunch.

Madhusudan, a B.Tech in metallurgical engineering from IIT (the Indian Institute of Technology), Madras, is a post-graduate from IIM (the Indian Institute of Management), Bangalore, with specialisation in marketing and international business.

Prior to joining Lucid, he had worked as: director of sales-Europe in Future Software Ltd, business manager-e-business team Satyam Infoway Ltd, deputy general manager in Lucent Technologies Ltd-Power Systems Group, area sales manager in Eicher Motors, and graduate engineer trainee in Mahindra Ugine Steel Ltd.

Lucid Software Ltd ( www.lucidsoft.net), established in 2000, works in the area of advanced NDT. The company is actively involved in R&D (research and development) with leading scientific and educational institutions in India and Germany.

C.P. Madhusudan

Do a Google search, and you’d find many definitions of NDT. Such as, that it refers to “those forms of testing that do not result in permanent damage or deformation to the part being tested,” as http://metals.about.com explains. “Typical examples are magnetic crack detection, ultrasonic inspection, X-Ray inspection and gamma radiography.” As the name suggests, the aim of NDT is to evaluate defects in objects without having to physically break them up and test them.

In the current competitive environment, quality of production and residual life of assets are of paramount interest to the consumer, emphasises Madhusudan. “Also known as NDE (non-destructive evaluation), NDT refers to the method of examining materials and components in order to identify and quantify defects and degradations in material properties before they result in failure.”

As an exercise, NDT is on an overdrive in the US, especially after the collapse of the Minnesota bridge. Investigators discovered, a few weeks ago, that the half-a-century-old bridge, which fell into the Mississippi River on August 1 last year killing 13, had given way owing to a design flaw. “The aim of the NDT is to ensure the safe utilisation of engineering structures, and to guarantee product quality and performance upon production,” elaborates Madhusudan in an e-mail exchange subsequent to our meeting.

He compares NDT to medical diagnostics, which looks for defects inside a human body. “NDT utilises techniques such as ultrasound (UT), radiography (X-Ray), electromagnetic techniques etc, and draws its origin from a number of other areas of non-invasive measurement including medicine, geophysical prospecting, sonar and radar.”

Excerpts from the interview.

How does your product play a role in NDT? What were the earlier practices?

When manual systems were predominant, there was very little use for software in NDT, as skilled operators manually carried out tests.

The exponential rise in test-information generated has created the need for software tools and platforms among NDT users. The need of the hour is to make the data user-friendly. There are many engineers who can look at the test signals and interpret the results. There are still many more who aren’t deeply trained in NDT and need pictures.

The more visual the results, therefore, the more extensive will be the use of NDT. The growth of software is further driven by the need to improve testing efficiency and reproducibility and to manage and store increasing amounts of data.

Our software is used to acquire the data from an instrument, process the data through an application of specific tools, support decision making/make decisions, and then present or store/archive.

The other key challenges our software addresses are the ability to handle data from many techniques (multi-modality), and support industry standards such as DICONDE (Digital Imaging and Communication in Non-destructive Evaluation) and DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine).

What are the traditional applications of NDT? And where is NDT finding newer applications?

The traditional users of NDT include the production/maintenance departments of large –

Energy utilities (thermal, nuclear power plants);

Transportation industry (railways, aviation);

Manufacturing companies (product - automobile), (process – fertiliser); and

Oil and gas (pipelines, oil rigs).

There are a host of new areas where NDT techniques are being applied. Some of these include Homeland Security (in the US), structural health monitoring of infrastructure and other key assets, and solar cell manufacturing.

While all of NDT is targeted at safety and quality, there are some applications that are of very great importance to a country like India. These are in areas such as monitoring of dams, and detection of mines. Applications of NDT in wood and paintings enable people to preserve and care for their cultural heritage.

Some of the exciting projects that you are working on…

We are building some applications in civil engineering, which can help to maintain infrastructure.

Participation in sampling phased array development.

Applications in testing of aircraft materials.

Integration of multiple methods of testing for greater safety.

Testing of solar cells.

Do you see a greater appreciation of NDT’s role in India? Are there policy changes or mandates that are required for an increased adoption of NDT?

One of the hallmarks of a developed economy is a stringent focus on quality and safety in all aspects of life. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics between the developed and emerging economies.

Therefore, as India develops further, the awareness of quality and safety will continue to increase. This will greatly benefit the society and will also be a key growth driver for us at Lucid.

The large users of NDT in India, the energy and aviation sectors for example, have NDT awareness and usage on par with anywhere else in the world. It is in certain other sectors — such as the railways, automotive, and civil engineering — where there is still much room to catch up.

The presence of Government and public sector undertakings (PSUs) in many areas provides the advantage of institutional understanding and support for NDT. Some of the largest NDT technology groups exist within government organisations and PSUs in India. The other side of the coin is that modernisation of NDT is also subject to the speed at which the government operates in other areas.

Does insurance impact NDT?

Insurance companies influence NDT users by linking greater testing and certification to premium payable. This, I believe, will be a significant growth driver for the industry in the western world where large parts of the infrastructure are aging rapidly.

The bridges built as part of the great American highway system, for instance, are reaching the end of design life, as are a number of nuclear power plants, oil and gas pipelines.

An interesting example of the insurance impact is the stricter testing of lamp and telephone posts that has been dictated by insurance companies in hurricane/storm prone regions. This has resulted in the development of new systems to cater to this need.

On R&D and IP (intellectual property) creation in Lucid. Also, how do you keep your staff motivated?

We have very strong academic links; and R&D is a focus area for us. We work and partner with a number of German institutions such as IZFP (the Fraunhofer Institute for Non-Destructive Testing, located in Saarbrücken, Germany), EZRT (Das Entwicklungszentrum für Röntgentechnik, a German Development Centre for X-Ray Technology), and BAM (Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, based in Berlin), and the Indian institutions such as IGCAR (the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research). In addition, we have alumni connections to the IITs, in Madras and Roorke.

We provide our staff with the opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies in the NDT and software interface. Many of our people have advanced degrees and hold patents jointly with our research partners in Germany. We value expertise and hence provide an open atmosphere for learning and creativity.

Future plans. Acquisitions?

We are in the process of establishing Lucid as the “Go to organisation” for NDT software globally. While NDT itself is a niche, there are a number of sub-niche technologies in this space and we would like to acquire companies for some of that. We are also open to acquisitions that give us access to key customers in this space.

As an IIT-ian do you see a greater interest in entrepreneurship among the young?

I was recently a judge at the ‘Business Idea’ competition held as part of ‘Shaastra 2007’ (the IIT Madras Technology Festival). I was amazed by the high standard of the participants. It was fantastic to see the breadth of ideas and depth of knowledge in the participants, many of whom were third year students of engineering.

I believe this is a great time to be a young entrepreneur. There are of course gaps in early-stage funding and also lack of incubator facilities, and this is an area where I hope to contribute to in the coming years.

A brief history of the company, and its progress.

The company founders all have links to IIT Madras and have been in the NDT and allied industries for over 15 years. In particular, Krishna Mohan Reddy and Dr Helmut Wolf had been operating an inspection and equipment trading business in the NDT space since mid 1990s. They were aware of the increasing role of software in NDT and had been supporting some European customers with software development services.

In 2000, they teamed up with Satish and Sriram, both IIT Madras alumni, and floated Lucid to cater specifically to the software development needs of the NDT industry. We have doubled our team size in the last 12 months and have increased revenue six-fold in the last 24 months.

The bulk of our revenue comes from European companies that include system manufacturers, inspection companies and research institutions. Lucid has played a key role in the development of sampling phased array technology, which has opened up new vistas in ultrasonic testing of aircraft composites materials. This also has the potential to significantly speed up testing in a factory environment.

In India we are currently engaged with the high-end NDT users in the nuclear and aerospace domains. We have a four-way MOU (memorandum of understanding) with IZFP, QNET (the marketing and services affiliate of IZFP), IGCAR, and Lucid to build advanced NDT solutions.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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