A robotic platform for aircraft composite structure inspection using thermography

Abstract

Water ingression is a critical issue in honeycomb composite structures, which could result in catastrophic structural failure. In the aviation industry, they are widely used to manufacture critical aircraft structural components including fuselage, wings, and flight control surfaces. Catastrophic failure of these structures would be disastrous, thus identifying water accumulation in earlier stages of the defect is necessary. The conventional non-destructive testing method is thermography which is performed using handheld thermography cameras by manually accessing the specific areas. This method of inspection has been identified to be a risky, costly, time-consuming, and inspector-dependent technique. This paper describes using a wall-climbing robotic platform that can be controlled remotely to access and perform the inspection on a targeted structural area replacing the manual process. The designed wall-climbing inspection robot onboard a heat pump to stimulate the composite surface to an adequate temperature and, an infrared sensor to feed the real-time temperature data via Bluetooth serial communication to a remote computer system to be processed into a thermal image and evaluated to determine the presence of water. The results obtained from the thermographic sensor are validated with the comparison of the Fluke thermography camera.