Marine Industry Partnership: Waygate & RINA

Global technology cooperation agreement combines Waygate Technologies’ advanced nondestructive inspection technologies with RINA’s deep domain expertise in the marine industry to optimize production processes and efficiencies.

HUERTH, Germany, and GENOVA, Italy, September 7, 2022 – Waygate Technologies, a Baker Hughes business and market leader in nondestructive testing (NDT) solutions for industrial inspection, has signed a global technology cooperation agreement with RINA, the multinational inspection, certification and engineering group, to deliver new and innovative solutions for the marine shipyard sector. First customized projects will start towards the end of this year. The agreement was announced today during the Gastech event in Milan which is co-hosted by Baker Hughes and where RINA is an associate sponsor.

During the ship manufacturing process, many parts are welded together and then inspected for acceptance, usually by means of visual inspection and nondestructive testing. As a combined force, Waygate Technologies and RINA, through its consulting engineering arm, RINA Consulting, will provide customers with new solutions to digitize their welding inspections and provide actionable data analytics. This will enable shipyard inspectors to detect welding defects immediately after welding is completed, reducing future delays caused by repair or reprocessing, and thus decrease costs significantly.

Shipyards will also use the solutions to generate statistics and insights from the inspection data collected, enabling them to identify critical points in the welding process and implement preventive corrective actions, to optimize their workflows, reduce the number of welding defects and increase the quality of welded joints, to the benefit of safety.

Waygate Technologies’ leading NDT expertise and the digital capabilities of the company’s integrated software ecosystem InspectionWorks enables precise Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) assisted recognition of welding defects (ADR), based on images captured in the field. Together, RINA and Waygate will help customers digitize all inspections and provide insightful analytics by leveraging continuously improving ADR algorithms.

“The cooperation between our two market-leading companies combines digital expertise and data intelligence in nondestructive inspection with our comprehensive market expertise in the marine industry to create exceptional benefit and added value for customers. Our joint solution helps detect potential defects during and after welding, optimizing production processes, reducing the risk of rework and scrap and eventually improve the quality of welded joints”, said Alberto Cavaggioni, CEO at RINA Consulting.

Nicola Jannis, CEO at Waygate Technologies, added: “Jointly, we will create pioneering inspection solutions and consulting services for marine shipyards and related businesses. Our digital NDT solution helps leverage data to constantly improve production process quality as well as efficiency and drive innovation.”

For Waygate Technologies, the agreement marks another milestone in the company’s strategy to invest for growth and expand its leading position in selected markets by combining NDT solutions with digitalization and collaboration with industry partners. This partnership with RINA aligns with Waygate Technologies’ mission to evolve from a provider of NDT hardware and renowned service capability to a solutions partner for data insight, catalyzing the customers’ digital transformation and giving them a competitive edge.