Enhancement of Damage Detectability in Aircraft Structures Using the Fusion of NDT Results

Following the damage tolerance philosophy in aircraft design and operation, one of the most significant stages of maintenance is non-destructive testing of structures. It is, therefore, essential to use testing methods sensitive to particular damage types occurring in aircraft structures during operation. In this paper, the authors present a study on selection and comparison of methods of information fusion applied to testing the results of inspection of composite structures used in aircraft elements, obtained using various ultrasonic methods. The presented approach of fusion of ultrasonic scans allows for enhancement of damage detection and identification due to the presence of different parts of information about detected damage obtained from different initial information sources in a single resulting set. Such an approach can be helpful at the decision-making stage during inspection of aircraft elements and structures. Besides the methodology, the GUI-based software for performing fusion of various types of ultrasonic data is presented.