Quantitative Measurement of Metal Loss Due to Corrosion in Aluminum Aircraft Skin

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1996
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Hsu, David
Patton, T.
Dayal, Vinay
Hinzie, B.
Gray, Joseph
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Dayal, Vinay
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Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation
Center for Nondestructive Evaluation

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 detection and characterization of corrosion is one of the many challenges in the nondestructive inspection (NDI) of aging aircraft. A number of groups are pursuing ultrasonic techniques for the detection and evaluation of corrosion in such aluminum fuselage structures such as lap splices and tear straps [1]. Under the FAA-Aging Aircraft Research Program, Patton and Hsu [2–4] at Iowa State University have developed the capability to apply high resolution, water-coupled, focused-beam ultrasonic NDI to aircraft fuselage structures in a maintenance hangar environment. The method, known as the “Dripless Bubbler” technique, is a combination of focused-beam immersion ultrasonics with a portable ultrasonic scanner. With the Dripless Bubbler, B- and C-scan images of the aircraft fuselage may be acquired using both high frequency and low frequency immersion ultrasonics typically only reserved for the laboratory. In this paper, we present results on corrosion detection in the outer aluminum skin of a fuselage lap splice section using high frequency (15 MHz nominal center frequency) immersion ultrasonics, and compare these results against those obtained from collimated-beam X-ray attenuation measurements. This comparison has been quite instructive and revealed several important considerations in the interpretation of both ultrasonic and X-ray data when applied to the quantitative measurement of metal skin thickness.

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Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 1996