Blog : What's new ?

On August 8^th, 2011, EXTENDE Inc. opened for business in the U.S.A., supporting our customers in the U.S.A. and Canada. At that time, EXTENDE Inc. was located in Ballston Spa, NY, U.S.A.. EXTENDE S.A. had one office in Orsay, France and the entire EXTENDE team was just 9 people. Now there are 15 people on the EXTENDE team, with 3 offices in France, and a relocation of the EXTENDE Inc. office to Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.A., putting us much closer to our customers in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

In 2011, our only product was CIVA (UT, ET and RT modules), and our services were limited to training and simulation-based consulting. Ten years later, CIVA has continued to evolve, and additional modules have been released (CT, GWT, SHM, Script), new CIVA based products have been created including CIVA Education (UT, ET and RT) and CIVA UT Analysis. More recently, EXTENDE has released its first two training simulators, TraiNDE UT and TraiNDE RT, designed to revolutionize the way hands-on NDT is taught. Of course, we are more than ever available for simulation-based consulting and training classes.

Contributing to the NDT community in the U.S.A. and Canada, EXTENDE Inc. V.P. Erica Schumacher regularly supports key NDT conferences in this region via exhibits, presentations and occasionally conference sponsorship. At the 2019 CINDE annual conference, EXTENDE was one of a few companies honored with the 2019 NDT in Canada Exhibitor Appreciation Award.

Our 10^th year of business started in the middle of a world-wide pandemic that led to changes in the way we all do business. Training classes that have always been taught in person have since been taught virtually, while the one in-person class taught last year included a student attending remotely from another location. Interest increased in our education software CIVA Education as NDT instructors looked for more engaging ways to teach the physics of NDT remotely. While some of us already worked from home, many others did so for the first time. All of us had lots of opportunities to use web meeting technologies and hone our skills at virtual meetings and presentations.

Looking to the future, we see our business in North America growing, and our presence there growing to meet the increasing demand for our products and services. One thing that will remain the same is our commitment to work together with our customers to help make the world a safer place.

The EXTENDE team.

When designing and qualifying Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and predictive maintenance strategies, it is important to know for which defect size and location the system will be able to detect the damage. Experimentally, it is really difficult and costly to test lots of scenarios since this requires production of many mock-ups with different defects, and to implement all of them with embedded sensors.

CIVA SHM enables the simulation of Guided Waves monitoring, and includes imaging tools that can characterize a defect signature with a visible indication. It is very easy to define variable parameters with simulation. Thanks to metamodels available in CIVA software, modelling becomes even more powerful as you will be able to produce a continuum of results to fully explore the impact of different variable parameters.

Our video of CIVA SHM introduces one simulation example with a monitored aluminum plate. One defect is included, and the defect size and location are defined as variable parameters. Thanks to the CIVA metamodel, you can visualize all possible defect indications obtained in the range of variation defined, and then predict the situations where the system will be able to detect the flaw.

This CIVA example only required 4 hours of computation on a simple computer!

Feel free to contact us if you need more information about CIVA SHM and metamodels.

The EXTENDE team.