Numerically Enhanced Thermal Inspection of Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Inhibitor/Liner/Fuel Bondline
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Begun in 1973, the Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) is the premier international NDE meeting designed to provide an interface between research and early engineering through the presentation of current ideas and results focused on facilitating a rapid transfer to engineering development.
This site provides free, public access to papers presented at the annual QNDE conference between 1983 and 1999, and abstracts for papers presented at the conference since 2001.
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Abstract
The Solid Rocket Motors (SRM’s) for the Space Shuttle are fabricated by laying up and molding materials, such as insulation, which are joined using adhesives, the adhesives being set along with the materials in a final curing process for an entire motor segment at a time. The resulting structure (Fig. 1) has two important properties from the point of view of inspection: integrity of the adhesive joints (bondlines) is of great importance, and the structure cannot be disassembled for inspection prior to use. Of particular interest are disbonds producing small voids (delaminations) at the bondlines. Specific delaminations can be located in service hardware only by using NDE methods. This paper reports on the application of thermal methods for performing such inspections.