Fri, 05 February, 2021
Jonathan Edmund has recently completed his master’s degree in civil engineering and is working as an inspection engineer at MJ Inspection, a consultancy company based in Johor Bahru. He landed his current job following his internship at the same company. During his internship, he had the opportunity to work on the MLNG Train 9 project in Bintulu for a few months, during which he practiced magnetic particle testing (MT), ultrasonic testing (UT) and the time of flight diffraction (TOFD) methods of NDT inspection.
Ever since he started working in his latest position, besides the conventional methods of MT and PT, his role has become more involved with the advanced NDT techniques of ToFD and PAUT. As an inspection engineer, he has to ensure that certain procedures are being undertaken properly and apply the necessary amendments to the procedures as required.
Johnathan is attending CSWIP MT and PT courses at TWI. He believes that, although many engineers who work in the field of oil and gas in Malaysia are familiar with NDT, they do not have a deep understanding of these methods and, despite knowing how to perform the inspection technique, they don’t know why they perform a particular test or what are the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques. Jonathan admits that he chose to take the training as he would like to understand the concepts from the root and improve his overall knowledge.
He explained that his personal preference is to work on site and, as he has observed, many of his peers tend to overlook the small details when it comes to inspection. As an example, Jonathan pointed to the various NDT techniques that can be used for inspection of pipes and how the engineers may not specifically know why a certain technique is being used or what the advantages or the disadvantages are to that technique. So, if an engineer has the knowledge, he can perform much better and be far more versatile. Besides the obvious value of knowledge gained through the training, the CSWIP certificate itself is a very valuable addition to anyone’s CV.
Johnathan explains that, besides learning the advantages and disadvantages of the NDT method he is studying, this course also teaches him about the limitations of the techniques and how you can use the limitations of a certain technique to improve the outcome of the test. On top of that, he has learnt about the precise performance of the test method and how using the evident findings from the test can assist him in judging the defective surfaces.
Johnathan finds the PT course module very comprehensive and detailed and is very impressed by his lecturer, Mr Emran, as he explains, “the weirdest questions I have; he has a perfect answer for it!”
Johnathan is very pleased by how the course content is up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry and mentions that all the content that is highlighted as important in the course is what’s considered as important for the site work. He finds it very useful to be able to apply 80-90 percent of what he learns in the classroom to his work. Even though he works for an inspection company with access to all sorts of NDT equipment, he is impressed by the state of the art facilities and the equipped NDT laboratory at TWI. Johnathan believes that attending certification courses such as NDT techniques is very advantageous to one’s career, whether they come from engineering background or quality control inspection, as the knowledge gained through the course is invaluable.