Development of a NDT method using thermography for composite material inspection on aircraft using military thermal imager

This paper describes the methodology used to introduce thermography as new inspection method for composite parts in aircraft maintenance. It is here focused on two main topics : control of leading edge flaps of Belgian F16 (mainly due to ageing aircraft) and inspection of main and tail rotor blades of Belgian A109 Agusta helicopters. The new idea is to use typical military thermal imagers initially bought for surveillance which only give grey level images but with a good thermal sensitivity and spatial resolution and to develop a specific signal processing of digitized images.