THEME PARK INSPECTION
Theme Parks are visited by millions of people world-wide who are always looking for more exciting rides. This is placing an increasing demand on the properties of the material being used and on the performance of inspection techniques. Customer satisfaction demands that the best rides are available whenever the theme park is open, which is often all year round, while the increased loading on these rides requires more frequent inspection. This means inspection techniques have to be used which are fast and non-invasive but which can reliably detect smaller defects than previously required.
Theme park inspection thus ideally requires a technique that can inspect through the paint coatings to avoid having to remove the ride from service while paint is removed and reapplied. Trials carried out in the past have shown that the Alternating Current Field Measurement (ACFM) technique can detect and size defects at least as well as conventional surface breaking detection techniques and its performance does not deteriorate when inspecting through paint or other forms of coating.
This ability to inspect through paint gives a large economic benefit and has led to the use of ACFM in a number of theme parks. For example, in one theme park the track of one of the rides used to be inspected during the annual shutdown when a number of the supports were stripped of paint, inspected using magnetic particle inspection techniques and then repainted. This process typically took three weeks to cover one-tenth of the ride, one week for the cleaning, one for the inspection and one for refurbishment and repainting. A change to inspection using the ACFM technique with no prior cleaning led to around twice as many supports being inspected in just one week.
 |
The experience gained from many critical offshore and other industrial inspections with the ACFM technique has now been applied to the inspection of theme park structures and ride components with the same efficiency, economic savings and reliability. In summary, the advantages provided by ACFM for inspection of theme park rides are:
- Can inspect through paint, avoiding need to remove and re-apply as with MPI, thus greatly reducing total inspection times, and allowing the ride to remain open longer.
- Deployable by rope access technician allowing quicker access to difficult inspection sites.
- Response is proportional to defect depth, eliminating time spent repairing spurious indications.
- All data is stored on computer providing records for audit purposes, off-line reanalysis.
- Operator training available under PCN, CSWIP or Lloyds-approved schemes.
