Probability of Detection (POD) for Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE)

The issues of POD and NDE reliability have received considerable attention from the research community over the last few years. Certainly part of the impetus for this movement is the realization that successful life management of the increasing inventory of aging systems depends on the ability to quantify NDE procedure capability and reliability. The accepted method of NDE capability quantification, the POD curve, shows the probability of a flaws detection as a function of flaw size for a specific inspection technique. While a complete and successful POD determination is quite expensive, it has been pointed out by Grills 2001 that the return on investment can be very high in terms of improved safety, lower life cycle cost and extended system life. Recent research efforts involving POD and NDE reliability have been directed toward broadening application by using actual in-service inspection data, using smaller data sets, transferring information from simple shapes to complex structures, and using neural networks, among others.