High-Performance Composites is read by qualified composites industry professionals in the fields of continuous carbon fiber and other high-performance composites as well as the associated end-markets of aerospace, military, and automotive.
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WORK IN PROGRESS 3 2 | H I G H - P E R F O R M A N C E C O M P O S I T E S N ondestructive testing (NDT) has been used in the manufac- ture and evaluation of advanced composite structures for de- cades. In that time, NDT has evolved signifcantly. Early ultrasound testing (UT), for example, used a single piezoelectric element, and the NDT process was excruciatingly slow. Today, phased-array UT systems electronically combine and simultaneously digitally process information from hundreds of these elements, enabling the user to more productively sweep large surfaces and scan more complex geometries. Im- provements in digital signal processing and the incorporation of industrial ro- bots have enabled greater fexibility and automated the testing process. Most re- cently, the use of laser UT — or laser ul- trasonics (LUS) — has freed the process from coupling agents (water or gels), and from the need for precise probe align- ment — the energy beam no longer has to be perpendicular to the inspected sur- face (see "Learn More," p. 33). Despite this push toward industrial-scale, inline inspection of production parts, little has been done, until now, to apply automat- ed NDT to the thousands of structural tests required for composite aerostruc- tures certifcation. Based on a long history in NDT devel- opment, Tecnatom (Madrid, Spain) and the Center for Advanced Technologies (CATEC, Seville, Spain) are addressing that lack as participants in the Clean Sky Joint Undertaking, the largest aerospace research program ever pursued in Eu- rope. Tecnatom and CATEC were recently awarded funding to pursue "Develop- ment of novel inspection approaches and Automating current manual testing promises increased speed, reduced cost, earlier damage detection and more detailed analysis of damage growth. Extending robotic NDT to aerospace certification BY GINGER GARDINER Robotically assisted NDT Tecnatom has developed automated NDT inspection systems that use KUKA industrial robots (top) and provide C-scan visualization of online 3-D ultrasonic data (inset). Certification-type test trials Technicians at Spain's Center for Advanced Technologies (CATEC) use light sources and infrared cameras to provide a nondestructive thermography analysis (bottom) of damage growth in a carbon fiber aircraft structure (right side of image at left) during a certification-type structural test. Source (both photos): CATEC Source: Tecnatom 0714HPC WIP-OK.indd 32 6/17/2014 10:40:57 AM