Human Factors and Ergonomics in Dye Penetrant and Magnetic Particles Nondestructive Inspection Methods

Dye Penetrant Inspection (DPI) and Magnetic Particles Inspection (MPI) are two of the most commonly used Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques in industry. Both techniques do rely heavily on human judgment and visual capability to identify any faults or defects on the specimen at the end of the process. Despite the fact that human plays an important role on the reliability of the NDT test results, very little research work has been carried out to study the ergonomics and human factors in using these NDT methods. In this paper, several human factors which could affect the reliability of the tests are discussed and some recommendations are also provided to improve the tests.