The aim of this project is to develop innovative Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques to on-line monitor CFRP damages during structural tests execution. The demonstrator will include one or more NDT techniques. NDT instrumentation will perform automatically and without human intervention data acquisition and analysis and will transfer results through web to the structural test control system in real-time.

Up to now, ultrasonic conventional manual inspection is carried out. For safety reasons, facilities are stopped before. One of the first steps of the project will consist in demonstrating the feasibility of novel NDT techniques. Among others, non-contact advanced ultrasonic inspection is proposed (laser ultrasonics, air-coupled UT) as well as other imaging techniques, such as infrared thermography and laser shearography. All these approaches are postulated with the aim of:
- avoiding human intervention,
- reducing inspection time,
- improving inspection quality by providing NDT data positioning and recording,
- simplifying system automation, and
- provinding processed data by means of image processing and data fusion, extracting automatically relevant information to support structural test follow up and associated decision making procedures.

A NDT demonstrator will be validated at subcomponent level and in a more realistic scenario (f.i.on large test parts with curved laminates and complex geometries).