The Far East NDT Forum was held in Nanjing, China, in June 2008. It attracted a wide cross-section of researchers from the Asian or Far East region, in addition to a significant number of high-profile scientists from further afield. The Far East is rightly recognised as having a high rate of development for its commercial and manufacturing industries, but intrinsically linked to this are the developments being made in the scientific community.
Nondestructive testing activities are of course an applied science and have benefitted from other socio-economic developments in the Far East, as there is a growing recognition of the need and benefits of such research. All scientific journals have seen strong increases in the rate of submissions from researchers based in Asia, and this of course should be reflected in the number of novel and high-quality papers that appear in peer-reviewed publications. The first Far East NDT Forum took place in Nanjing in 2004 and has run every year since then, and we hope to see work published from these meetings in the years to come.
This is the second part of the Special Issue of selected papers from the Far East NDT Forum. As with Part 1, most originate from the region, and they form a good cross-section of some of the high-quality scientific research that is undertaken in the Far East. At Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation, we recognise the fact that there is a large volume of high-quality scientific work undertaken in Asia that is currently under-represented.
We aim to do our best to try and help colleagues from overseas to get their high-quality scientific papers published, with the excellent assistance that the publishers provide.
I would particularly like to thank Prof. Gui Yun Tian, from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, for his assistance in putting together this Special Issue. We hope that you enjoy reading these papers and get some flavour of the wide range of good scientific NDT work being undertaken and presented at the Far East NDT Forum.