Novel Nondestructive Evaluation for Aircraft Maintenance Part Inspection and Production

Non-destructive inspection (NDI) has been broadly used for mechanical health management and quality control in many fields. It is especially important for aircraft maintenance part inspection and product where any mechanical parts flaw may result a catastrophic failure. Due to current lengthy depot overhaul of aircraft maintenance and repairing, the Air Force is looking for solutions for accelerating the overhaul process and reducing deport maintenance time, returning the aircraft to service sooner and reducing overhaul costs. NDI would be a powerful technology speed up the processing. In this proposal, Boston Applied Technologies Incorporated (BATI) proposes a low cost and high performance solution by developing a smart Portable X-ray Transmission/Backscattering NDI System to solve the problems current NDI systems are suffering from. In the approach several innovative techniques will be implemented. The proposed technology could be able to collect both of the backscattering and the transmission x-ray image at the same time. A differential imaging will be used for high resolution and high signal/noise ratio. The proposed X-ray Transmission/Backscattering NDI technology, therefore, is considered as the method of choice fulfilling the requirement of Air Force aircraft maintenance part inspection and production.