Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 2

In the aerospace industry, additive manufacturing (AM) is increasingly adopted for the production of critical parts as it allows for considerable gains in terms of weight, cost and engineering performance. However, its expansion is slowed down by the limited confidence in the process repeatability which is strongly linked to the lack of efficient non-destructive testing (NDT) to assess the quality of manufactured parts. NDT techniques need to be developed and optimized to address the challenging specificities of AM parts such as surface roughness, porosity, anisotropy and geometric complexities rendered possible by the process. The objective of this project, in partnership with Collins Aerospace, is to contribute to the development of advanced NDT techniques for the inspection of Ti-6Al-4V Titanium alloy landing gear parts obtained by powder bed fusion (PBF) and wire arc melting (WAM). Innovative ultrasound techniques will be developed and adapted to three families of parts defined by their geometric complexity. The developed techniques will then be validated on reference parts with simulated defects. The validated techniques will then lead to guidelines for inspection procedures for each family of parts.