September 22-24, 2019 the Railway Interchange-2019 – a traditional conference and exhibition dedicated to the railroad transport took place in the United States of America. It is the largest forum of the railroad sector in North America.

The event is held every two years since 2011. This year, the total registered attendance reached 8,450. The representatives from 47 countries came to showcase 746 exhibits. Among others, OKOndt GROUP™ also exhibited their NDT products, namely the devices for testing the railroad bed integrity, welded joints quality, flaw detection and defects evaluation of rails and turnouts.

The representatives of our company participated in the RI-2019 as a member of REMSA, an organization that represents and promotes companies and individuals who manufacture or sell products and/or services in the railroad maintenance-of-way industry. OKOndt GROUP™ became a corporate member of REMSA in spring 2019.

Format of the exhibition enabled our company to demonstrate a wide product range and advantages of our technologies.

The below devices were featured at our booth:

• UDS2-77 – an ultrasonic single rail flaw detector for continuous rail testing. Up to 13 testing channels may be implemented in this equipment depending on the Customer’s needs. Beside several information display modes that are available, there are also such options as saving test results to the device internal memory with the possibility to review the reports at any convenient time and determining the conditional size of the defect.
• USR-01 — a set used for the rail welded joints testing and is composed of a scanning device, manual probes, Sonocon B ultrasonic flaw detector.
• Sonocon B – portable ultrasonic flaw detector that can also be used as a thickness gauge. The device is light-weight, fits perfectly in an operator’s hand that facilitate testing in hard-to-reach areas.
• Eddycon C — portable eddy current flaw detector – the device for manual testing of surface and sub-surface defects. The device allows to detect defects having the minimum depth of 0.1 mm and minimum opening of 0.002 mm by the eddy current method and is capable of conditionally evaluating the defects’ length and depth. The flaw detector’s memory allows to store a large amount of settings and test results.

The booth of OKOndt GROUP™ attracted attention of both American companies and the visitors from abroad. NOMO GROUP company representatives, our American distributor, together with the OKOndt GROUP™specialists were at the booth and took an active part in equipment demonstration, answered questions and distributed information to the booth visitors.

The outcome of the exhibition is establishing of new business contacts, acquaintance with American companies operating in railroad service and maintenance and which are in need of a quality means for the railroad testingand timely detection of manufacturing and in-service defects. It’s good to note that our competitors – the manufacturers of NDT equipment  — came to see and learn the developments of the OKOndt GROUP™ engineers paying a special attention to the wide range of technical capacities of the represented equipment.