Comparison of Immersion and Portable Ultrasonic Housing to Quantify the Adhesive Bond Thickness and Sizing of Foreign Objects

High-performance materials, such as carbon fiber laminates, are costly to manufacture and are often used in demanding environments requiring the use of high-resolution non-destructive testing (NDT) methods to confirm the integrity of the parts. One NDT method that has shown promise for qualifying carbon fiber laminates is the use of immersion ultrasound with spherically focused probes. However, many parts may not be submersible in an immersion tank due to size or material constraints. These parts must be scanned with contact transducers with inferior resolutions or with expensive and messy systems such as bubblers. This research presents the use of a novel housing system that allows for the use of focused immersion transducers in an out-of-tank portable ultrasonic scanning application. This work presents a comparison between scans taken using a custom high-resolution immersion system and scans taken using the presented housing. There are a wide variety of potential inspection applications for this novel system, and the present work focused on two specific applications: the quantification of the spatially varying adhesive thickness in bonded carbon fiber laminates and the quantification of foreign object inclusions in carbon fiber laminates. The results presented show that scans using the portable housing are comparable in quality to scans performed using an immersion system. Specifically, both inspection approaches had an average error of 0.04 mm when quantifying the adhesive thickness of a bonded composite, and for the foreign object detection, the error in quantifying the dimensions of the embedded foreign object was 0.1 mm and 0.2 mm for the immersion system and the portable inspection system, respectively. The demonstration was performed in a laboratory setting, but a discussion is provided for the necessary improvements needed to extend the system for use in field applications.