Aircraft safety inspection to reach new heights

If air travel is to grow as an industry passengers must have confidence in its approach to safety. The AERONEWS project is at the forefront of research into the safety inspection of aircraft structures, and Professor Koen Van Den Abeele certainly has some interesting views on the subject.

 Air travel is crucial to the health of the international economy. Airlines are keen to take as large a share of this growing market as possible, but in the hunt for profits operators have allowed their focus to shift from their primary responsibility. “Aircraft safety inspection does not place sufficient emphasis on the identification of incipient damage states,” alleges Professor Koen Van Den Abeele of the AERONEWS project, an initiative comprised of 18 partners from across Europe that was formed with the express aim of improving aircraft safety. “If we are to improve the accuracy of structural integrity predictions we must minimise the uncertainty associated with critical parameters for degradation, damage and failure modes in components. Hence more effort should be put into developing an enhanced, reliable, integrated measurement system and protocol for identifying microcracks in aircraft components and structures.”

The AERONEWS project is involved in the development of innovative non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques based on Nonlinear Elastic Wave Spectroscopy (NEWS) that could significantly improve aircraft safety and may also have a long-term impact on design. The project includes seven major workplans (WP1-WP7), ranging from the optimisation study of NEWS techniques to detect micro-scale damage in aircraft components and structures, right through to a prototype development and a full-scale validation.

Recent advances in modern material technology, and particularly in applied fields like aeronautics, require the development of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques that allow for the quantification of microstructural damage in a wide variety of materials during their manufacture and life cycle. “The monitoring of these materials, including alloys and composites, ensures both their quality and durability,” says Van Den Abeele.

AERONEWS plans for the eventual exploitation and dissemination of their work reach well beyond the aeronautics field. “Given the scientific breakthroughs made in developing NEWS over the past decade, it is now ready to address industrial problems.”

Published: Monday, 9th November 2009