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Ultrasonic inspection of large CFRP components requires an accurate positioning of the part with respect to the equipment’s coordinate system to ensure normal incidence during the scan. Fulfilling this condition often implies impractical and time-consuming manual adjustments of the part. A new method is proposed for ultrasonically determining the position of a complex part installed in an inspection system, and automatically correcting the offline-programmed path instead of iteratively and manually adjusting the part’s position. Two application strategies of our method are presented and experimentally tested on a complex CFRP landing gear component. The results suggest that even the simplest strategy using a planar learning scan of a randomly positioned part can produce C-scans of equal quality as those obtained with the manual alignment, in a fraction of the time that this process usually takes.

This paper presents the last evolutions of a program developed in 2020 for the automated generation of optimal scanning paths for 0°LW ultrasonic inspections of complex parts. After summarizing the overall concepts of the path generation method, the paper presents two new algorithms (side following path and side/radius interpolating path) recently developed for specific geometries such as long and thin parts, or parts including nonparallel radii. Trajectories automatically generated by the software are then presented for a collection of various aerospace and industrial CFRP components. The results show that the software was able to generate optimal paths for all the tested geometries, using the part’s 3D surface CAD and the probe’s characteristics as only inputs. In particular, the addition of the new algorithms allows for the generation of satisfactory trajectories even for the parts that were previously problematic.