Ergonomics, safety and health issues in magnetic particles inspection and dye penetrant inspection

Magnetic Particles Inspection (MPI) and Dye Penetrant Inspection (DPI) are two of the most common Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques used in industry. Both techniques do rely heavily on human judgment and visual capability to identify any faults or defects on the specimen at the end of the process. Despite the fact that human plays an important on the reliability of the NDT test results, very little research work has been carried out to study the ergonomics and human factors in using these NDT methods. In this paper, several human factors which could affect the reliability of the tests are discussed and some recommendations are also provided to improve the tests.