Outer Mold Line Material Condition Probe

The Department of Defense is interested in technologies that will inform fleet-level maintenance decisions with regards to repainting schedules for air vehicles, which would cause a transition from traditional schedule-based maintenance to condition-based maintenance for the visual appearance of aircraft. Proposed solutions must be easy to operate and rugged enough to operate in a flightline and/or hangar environment (land- and sea-based) with minimal training/re-training and qualification requirements. Self-calibration or a quick user calibration with a standard (AMS-STD-595) is preferred over periodic factory calibration, which would result in downtime and the need to keep multiple probes on hand. In the Phase I Effort, TRI Austin will design and fabricate a prototype ruggedized colorimeter that is able to measure the color of OML topcoats with minimal processing and no onboard data storage. A commercial colorimeter and spectrophotometer will be used as reference, one of which has already been used to measure color and gloss on active aircraft (TRL 7), but does not meet the ruggedization requirements in the Phase I. The probe will be handheld, lightweight, powered by commercial batteries, not require wireless connectivity, and will measure the level of degradation of outer mold line topcoat paints based on established calibration curves.