Magnetostructural Analysis

Two different metal weakness detection systems used in the oil industry.

One of them was, believe it or not, a realtime system running on the BBC Micro.

Programmed in Basic and 8-bit assembly, this system sampled inductive sensors to calculate the wall thickness of pipes used for drilling oil wells, while a top secret kind of sensor was used to detect various weaknesses in the metal.

The other system was running on a regular PC, and hooked up to a digital oscilloscope.  The purpose of this system was to detect the effects of a metal stress test.

Target technologies

• MS DOS
• BBC micro
• Various digital oscilloscopes
• Hardware developed and manufactured by Damacon Engineering AS

Development tools

• Turbo Pascal
• Turbo Graphics
• Microsoft Macro Assembler
• BBC Basic
• BBC Assembler

Software made

• Metal weakness detection software
• Serial port device driver and interrupt handler for the IBM PC