Horspath is inside NDTScan's home territory. Working from Oxford, Neil Smuts covers Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire as a single patch, and Horspath projects are scanned and interpreted by the same named specialist. There is no subcontracted operator and no anonymous report.
Horspath has its own character for this work: the Oxford Business Park, the BMW Mini plant at Cowley and the Horspath industrial estate are on its boundary. Wherever the work sits in South Oxfordshire, the question NDTScan is answering is what the concrete actually contains, and how much of it can be trusted.
The on-site capture is only the first step. NDTScan's value is in the post-processing: analysing reflections, cross-checking traces against each other, resolving ambiguous returns and producing a fully interpreted result. In Horspath, as everywhere else, the data is worked up in the office before a single conclusion is drawn, and the report says plainly what was found, what was not found and how confident the reading is.
NDTScan will always say this to a Horspath client considering repairs: scan first. A repair specified without a proper survey and an expert interpretation is a repair to a guess. The survey establishes what is really there, so the engineer can design for the structure that exists rather than the one on the drawings.
Scan before you repair. That is the standing advice for every Horspath client, and the reason NDTScan reports what the concrete contains before anyone specifies what to do about it.
Services Available in Horspath
- GPR Concrete Scanning Pre-drill and pre-coring surveys, rebar and mesh mapping, post-tensioned tendon detection, void and honeycombing detection, slab thickness and cover measurement and RAAC identification. Method and antenna selected for the Horspath element in question, with the full interpreted record supplied.
- Ultrasonic Testing of Concrete Ultrasonic pulse velocity testing for uniformity and quality assessment, pulse echo for thickness and delamination where only one face is accessible, and the combined SONREB method for compressive strength estimation. Used across Oxfordshire where GPR alone cannot answer the question.
- Concrete Compressive Strength Assessment Rebound hammer surveys, UPV combined method and managed core extraction with laboratory testing to BS EN 13791. Independent reporting suitable for engineering acceptance, building control and dispute work on Horspath structures.
Typical Horspath Projects
Around Horspath the instructions NDTScan receives are shaped by commercial and laboratory floors where post-tensioned slabs are common, post-war housing where non-standard construction has to be identified before any works and former industrial and institutional buildings being brought back into use. Alongside those sit the constants of every Oxfordshire town: pre-drill and pre-coring scans on occupied buildings, post-tensioned slab investigation before any fixing or penetration, RAAC identification in schools and public buildings, and structural investigation before repair.
NDTScan also covers Oxford, Wheatley and Garsington and the rest of South Oxfordshire. Every one of these areas is reached from the Oxford base without a subcontractor in the chain.
About NDTScan
NDTScan is a specialist non-destructive testing company based in Oxford and led by Neil Smuts. Its core disciplines are GPR concrete scanning, ultrasonic testing and in-situ compressive strength assessment, brought together in its concrete scanning and structural condition survey service. NDTScan is a Level 4 UKCSS Operator, the first in the UK to achieve that certification. Horspath and the whole of Oxfordshire are within the company's everyday working area, and all work is reported to a standard suitable for engineering acceptance.