Damage evaluation based on ultrasonic testing of compos-ite aircraft elements and image analysis methods

Abstract

Composite aircraft elements are inspected with the use of non-destructive testing methods to detect the damage appearance and monitor its progression. Ultrasonic testing is one of the most commonly applied methods owing to its capabilities of detecting various types of internal flaws and dam-age as well as evaluating their location and geometrical properties. There are several di culties in analysing the ultrasonic data, which cover the high time-consumption of such analyses resulting from large sizes of the scans and a man-ual handling of them. Thus, due to the possible occurrence of human errors, there is a necessity of increasing the e ciency of these inspections by aiding the analysis of the ultrasonic data. The paper presents proposed methods of the application of image analysis methods for supporting the procedures of the ul-trasonic evaluation of the aircraft structures. These cover facilitating the steps of damage detection, quantification as well as a three dimensional reconstruc-tion and visualisation. The proposed approaches are computationally e cient and may facilitate the data interpretation and damage evaluation procedures.