Automatic Evaluation of Aerospace CFRP Structures Based on Ultrasonic Echo Signals

Components made of carbon-fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) used for aircraft construction are tested with ultrasonic sensors to guarantee their required stability. Topic of this paper is the automatic evaluation of the backscattered signals received by the sensors. The evaluation system is based on a statistical classifier using most discriminative features extracted from the backscattered echo signals. By this means we aim for an automatic characterization of the material mainly used for a reliable defect detection.