There are safety critical structures all around us such as nuclear plants, aircraft, gas pipelines, bridges and railway tracks. They are safety critical since any failure is potentially catastrophic. To avoid such disasters these structures are checked periodically for the presence of flaws and other precursors to the component failing. This is performed at various stages in the lifetime of the component: at the manufacturing stage, while the component is in service, and to assess the component for re-manufacturing at the end of its lifetime. Safety has become more pressing of late as many of these structures are operating well beyond their intended lifespan. To address this problem there have been rapid developments in the types of ultrasonic sensors that are used to find these flaws and cracks. These sensors produce massive data sets and therefore require a matched development in the mathematical algorithms used to extract the knowledge from this data. To enable this development this workshop brought together leading mathematicians, engineers and those from other disciplines.
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