Automation in production integrated NDT using thermography

Since the last decade the demand of CFRP parts is rapidly increasing in the aerospace industry. Besides the challenges in design and engineering, the manufacturing quality plays a key role. In order to achieve a higher quality, to decrease scrap rate and lowering manufacturing costs, the need for process integrated measurement techniques such as Lock-In Thermography are obligatory. One of the deficits so far is that Thermography lacks implementation on industrial scale. The approach at DLR Augsburg is a robot based measuring system for industrial applications such as measuring large CFRP structures of future aircraft generations (see Figure 1). Research at the DLR-Center for Lightweight-ProductionTechnology in Augsburg focuses on this and will give insight into the challenges and current work with this paper. Figure 1 Scenario of automated thermography within production environment