Abstract
This paper discusses a non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technique for the detection of damage in composite aircraft structures following high energy wide area blunt impact (HEWABI) from ground service equipment (GSE), such as heavy cargo loaders and other heavy equipment. The test structures typically include skin, co-cured stringers, and C-frames that are bolt-connected onto the skin with shear ties. The inspection exploits the waveguide geometry of these structures by utilizing ultrasonic guided waves and a line scan approach. Both a contact prototype and a non-contact prototype were developed and tested on realistic test panels subjected to impact in the laboratory. The results are presented in terms of receiver operating characteristic curves that show excellent probability of detection with low false alarm rates for defects located in the panel skin and stringers.
Highlights
Non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of aircraft structures is a crucial process to ensure passenger safety
Each one of these has advantages and drawbacks, addressing specific problems encountered knowledge, mostmethods of them aimed at the detection of sub-surface flaws and/or restricted in the inspection of different composite parts and joints of aircrafts and in detecting the multiple the development of the technique to a laboratory environment, we focus on the detection of impact categories of damage damage, that highly compromises the integrity of the aircraft [18], and we propose a field-applicable
The best detection performance was found for the cracked skin and the disbonded stringer defect (e.g., 100% probability of detection (POD) with less than 10% probability of false alarm (PFA)), with a somewhat worse performance for the detached/cracked stringer defect
Summary
Non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of aircraft structures is a crucial process to ensure passenger safety. Materials 2017, 10, 616; doi:10.3390/ma10060616 www.mdpi.com/journal/materials internal damages pushed researchers to develop more sophisticated technologies exploiting a wide variety of physics principles, such as ultrasonics, infrared thermography, shearography, and radiography [3,4] Each one of these methods has advantages and drawbacks, addressing specific problems encountered in the inspection of different composite parts and joints of aircrafts and in detecting the categories of damage [4]. The panels were has been understood in the past [3] and tested [19,20], and is here used for damage detection on a wide designed and manufactured following industry procedures and dedicated fabrication processes to aerospace specimen for the first time.
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