Shearography Technique on Inspection of Advanced Aircraft Composite Material

Abstract

The A320 aft fixed fairing is an advanced composite structure fabricated from laminate carbon woven and combines with honeycomb core which is externally mounted on the flap track fairing as a wing part of Airbus aircraft. These flaps are movable control surfaces to widen up the surface of the wing in order to increase the lifting. This paper discussed on the inspection of A320 aft fixed fairing by using shearography NDT technique. Shearography technique reveals the stress-affected zone due to additional loading that can be realized by the laser speckle correlation on the inspected composite panel. This A320 aft fixed fairing is identified as a scrap composite panel which having different sizes and orientations of defect. The results showed that the changes of shearing direction in laser shearography technique are an effective means to reveal the defects propagation in the composite component. The shearing at Y-axes direction is able to detect the cracks at horizontal orientation while shearing at X-axis has successfully detects the cracks at vertical orientation. Therefore, shearography could be utilized as an alternative inspection for other NDT method for inspection of composite material.