125-Year-Old-Business: One-Year-Old Name & Singular Purpose

A year ago, a 125-year-old powerhouse in the industrial inspection industry got a new name: Waygate Technologies, a Baker Hughes business. The new name brought with it a sense of excitement and energy, at least partially counterbalancing the uncertainty and loss caused by the pandemic.

Yet, underneath the novelty of the new name remains our corporate purpose: ensuring safety, quality, and productivity to drive progress and innovation, in partnership with our customers, across the world and beyond!

While we are no longer ‘GE Inspection Technologies,’ we remain the same company with deep domain expertise in nondestructive testing (NDT). We continue to provide solutions to the world’s biggest blue-chip companies in critical industries such as technology, aerospace, automotive, electronics and energy.

Our technologies and products power inspections of all types of industrial equipment – from pipelines carrying gas to heat homes; to critical parts in spacecrafts, cars and planes; to piping in beverage and pharmaceutical plants.

We develop and build some of the most advanced technologies – from borescopes that can detect and measure micro cracks, to ultrasound testing machines that can inspect entire rails and pipe sections; from robots that can travel into cavernous tanks to CT machines that can inspect for inner microscopic pores in parts the size of a small car.  

During manufacturing, service, and repair, we help our customers identify faults, irregularities, and other issues that affect safety, durability, and effectiveness.

While nondestructive testing is a solution for safety and compliance, it can also do much more.

It can be used to manufacture more efficiently, to reduce scrap, to extend the lifetime of assets, to lower quality costs, and to make machines, systems and processes run faster, safer, and longer. Industrial inspections can be used not only to detect defects but also to avoid and manage them.

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The ubiquity of big data today opens the way for nondestructive testing to support the digitization journey for our customers. By leveraging the massive data produced by asset inspections, spanning their entire lifecycle, we can guide our customers on this journey.

Our data management and analytics suite, InspectionWorks, offers customers intelligent data management through a hardware-agnostic interface that acquires inspection data from all critical components of an asset or a plant. This contextualised data provides customers with automatic defect detection, predictive maintenance, and advanced analytics that are optimised with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

Even as digitization and big data are transforming industrial operations, additive manufacturing is revolutionising how parts are manufactured. Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, enables the creation of parts that could not be produced before and drives affordable mass customisation. However, this potential is accompanied by unique quality and reliability challenges, and dramatically more complex inspection requirements. This is where we come in.

 At Waygate Technologies, we have systems that can conduct nanometric examinations of metal powder (the ‘raw material’ for additive) for defects in quality and porosity, and search for sub-microscopic defects in large complex parts several feet in diameter.

We can overlay results against the design and allow for automatic defect recognition. Even more, this information can be used to optimize the printing process and achieve faster prints, with greater quality and lower scrap rates.

Our purpose also means we are eager to work with industry partners to make the world better and safer. For example, we are leveraging our expertise in robotic inspections to support the four-year ’PILOTING’ initiative funded by the European Union. Launched last year, it seeks to establish an efficient and universally compatible high-tech approach to renewing Europe’s aging infrastructure, including bridges, tunnels, and dozens of oil refineries. We are leading the project’s efforts in the development of robotic systems with advanced autonomous functionalities, including crawlers, drones, and wheeled ground vehicles.

Baker Hughes and Waygate Technologies are committed to supporting the world’s decarbonization and energy transition. Our future depends on the speed of innovation in improving the world’s efficiency, reducing waste and developing new, carbon conscious, energy sources. At Waygate Technologies, we are supporting the safe and timely deployment of such innovation.

Our work includes inspecting hydrogen tanks and ensuring their integrity and functionality; assessing lithium-ion batteries to automatically discover defects; and enabling the improvement of manufacturing processes to lower scrap rates. We are qualifying new materials for use in advanced lightweight aerospace applications, and we are inspecting the world’s wind turbine fleet to ensure integrity and reliability. We are proud of our many contributions and are passionate about solving clean innovation challenges.

Writing this in early March 2021, it’s impossible not to acknowledge that the one-year anniversary of our new brand coincides with the 12 months since COVID-19 began its rapid spread across the globe. Demonstrating how our purpose guides everything we do, the Waygate Technologies team has done an amazing job navigating these difficult times and delivering for our customers. We are extremely proud of the commitment our employees have demonstrated around the globe.

As we enter our second year as Waygate Technologies, we remain passionate and committed to this purpose – ensuring safety, quality, and productivity to drive progress and innovation, in partnership with our customers, across the world and beyond!

Waygate Technologies showcases advanced ultrasonic testing solutions