Sonic IR crack detection of aircraft turbine engine blades with multi-frequency ultrasound excitations

Abstract

Effectively and accurately detecting cracks or defects in critical engine components, such as turbine engine blades, is very important for aircraft safety. Sonic Infrared (IR) Imaging is such a technology with great potential for these applications. This technology combines ultrasound excitation and IR imaging to identify cracks and flaws in targets. In general, failure of engine components, such as blades, begins with tiny cracks. Since the attenuation of the ultrasound wave propagation in turbine engine blades is small, the efficiency of crack detection in turbine engine blades can be quite high. The authors at Wayne State University have been developing the technology as a reliable tool for the future field use in aircraft engines and engine parts. One part of the development is to use finite element modeling to assist our understanding of effects of different parameters on crack heating while experimentally hard to achieve. The development has been focused with single frequency ultrasound excitation and some results have been presented in a previous conference. We are currently working on multi-frequency excitation models. The study will provide results and insights of the efficiency of different frequency excitation sources to foster the development of the technology for crack detection in aircraft engine components.

Ultrasonically stimulated thermography for crack detection of turbine blades

“…Zang et al excited turbine blades using multiple frequencies to locate cracks with a thermal imaging camera [23,24], and some studies used high-frequency loudspeakers as a source of excitation [25,26]. Kang et al increased the vibration amplitudes in the test component through an alternative constructive fastening solution for the ultrasonic horn and test component [27].…”

“…Many technical possibilities can stimulate and vibrate the components, such as using sonotrodes [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45], where 20 to 40 kHz signals are transmitted with high energy to the component to be measured. This creates a quasi-chaotic excitation, since single impulses are mainly transmitted and no periodic signals [18,20,34,38,43,[45][46][47][48].…”

Recent Advances in Active Infrared Thermography for Non-Destructive Testing of Aerospace Components

“…Specifically for the aerospace industry, UST is mainly used for the inspection of micro-cracks (of the order of microns) in aluminium aerospace components [ 102 ], aircraft engine fan blades [ 103 , 104 ] and composite primary and secondary structures. Early testing on composite materials included the evaluation of thick multilayer carbon/carbon composites used in wing leading edges of the space shuttle [ 105 ], the inspection of F16 airplane main landing gears [ 106 ] and the detection of internal delaminations in graphite-fibre composites and disbonds in airplane vertical stabilizers [ 107 ].…”

YOLOv3-Lite: A Lightweight Crack Detection Network for Aircraft Structure Based on Depthwise Separable Convolutions

“…Kadam et al [4] used a self-diagnosis technique to detect the cracking and de-bonding of the permanently embedded lead zirconate titanate (PZT). Cracks are reported as key in [5], which use the first-order reliability method (FORM + Fracture) to alleviate the computational cost of probabilistic defect-propagation analysis [6][7][8][9][10], which is commonly used to detect cracks using a special hardware device.…”