Submitted May 2005

Holographic and Shearographic NDT Applications in Aerospace Manufacturing

by John W. Newman*

ABSTRACT
Laser nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques based on interferometric imaging, primarily holography and shearography, have seen growing acceptance since the 1980s. With an increase in the use of composite materials and sandwich structures, the need for high speed, large area testing for fracture critical, subsurface discontinuities, such as disbonds, delamination, sheared cores or nonvisible damage in aircraft, missiles and marine composites, led to broad acceptance of laser based NDT techniques. Laser NDT techniques employing holography and shearography imaging interferometers complement ultrasonic testing, thermography and other NDT techniques as highly developed, mature and cost effective technology. As with all NDT methods, strengths and weakness must be completely understood, applications qualified through probability of detection verification with written procedures and rigorous training for operators and engineers alike. Once qualified for a particular application, holography and shearography systems can operate with extraordinary efficiency, reaching throughputs of 2.3 to 111 m2 (25 to 1200 ft2) per hour, 2.5 to 120 times the test rate for ultrasonic C-scans. As these technologies become more widely known, commercial applications in aerospace, electronics, marine composites, high performance tires and medical devices have greatly increased. In 2001, laser techniques reached a fundamental milestone with the inclusion of holography and shearography in SNT-TC-1A for Level III certification (American Society for Nondestructive Testing, 2001). This paper will present an overview of laser NDT technique applications in aerospace, electronics and marine composites, where they serve as highly effective, fully integrated industrial process controls, improving manufacturing quality while reducing costs. Keywords: holography, shearography, honeycomb, composites, abradable seals, helicopter blade, marine composites, thermal protection systems.

BACKGROUND
Laser interferometric imaging nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques such as holography and shearography have seen dramatic performance improvements in the last decade and wide acceptance in industry as means of high speed, cost effective testing and manufacturing process control. These performance gains have been made possible by the development of the personal computer, high resolution charge coupled device (CCD) and digital video cameras, high performance solid state lasers and the development of phase stepping algorithms. System output images show qualitative pictures of structural features and surface and subsurface discontinuities as well as quantitative data such as discontinuity size, area, depth, material deformation versus load change and material properties. Both holography and shearography have been implemented in important aerospace programs, providing cost effective, high speed discontinuity detection. Holography images test part responses to changes in load as
* Laser Technology, Inc., 1055 W. Germantown Pike, Norristown, PA 19403; (610) 631-5043 X14; e-mail <jwnewman50@aol.com>.
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well as part movement. Holography using continuous wave lasers and video frame rate data acquisition requires vibration isolation usually in the form of air supported isolation tables. Coupled with ultrasonic vibration excitation of the test part, holographic systems in production provide very high resolution images of disbonds in small complex shaped components, such as turbine aircraft components and medical devices. Shearographic NDT systems use a common path interferometer to image the first derivative of the out of plane deformation of the test part surface in response to a change in load. This important distinction is responsible for two key phenomena. First, shearography is less sensitive to the image degrading effect of environmental vibration. Shearographic systems may be built as portable units or into gantry systems, similar to ultrasonic C-scan systems, for scanning large structures. Second, the changes in the applied load required to reveal subsurface discontinuities frequently induce gross deformation or rotation of the test part. With holography, several important test part stressing techniques, such as thermal and vacuum stress, create gross part deformation. Discontinuity indications may be completely obscured by these translation fringe lines. Shearography, on the other hand, is sensitive only to the deformation derivatives and tends to show only the local deformation on the target surface due to the presence of a surface or subsurface discontinuity. Shearography, in particular, offers unique and proven discontinuity detection capabilities in aerospace composites manufacturing. Shearographic images show changes in surface slope in response to a change in applied load. Shearographic whole field, real time imaging of the out of plane deformation derivatives is sensitive to subsurface disbonds, delaminations, core damage, core splice joint separations and surface damage. Secondary aircraft structures have long used composite materials. The drive for better vehicle performance, lower fuel consumption and maintainability are pushing the application of composites and sandwich designs for primary structures as well. Faster and less expensive testing tools are necessary to reduce manufacturing costs and ensure consistent quality.

HOLOGRAPHIC NDT OF TURBINE AIRCRAFT COMPONENTS

Holography has been used since the 1970s for tire testing. Before the development of electronic holography or electronic speckle interferometer cameras, film holography cameras were used in combination with vacuum stress. Early film holography cameras were also used to solve a major production issue in the testing of abradable turbine engine components. Since the 1970s, turbine aircraft engines have used abradable seals in the compressor stages of the engine to achieve high pressure ratios per stage, reducing the turbine power required to drive

the compressor, reducing engine weight and increasing performance. The loss of this material can affect engine performance; testing of the bond line in production or engine overhaul is required. Ultrasonic through transmission C-scan is capable of detecting disbonds in parts where the shroud geometry is a straight or slightly conical cross section. However, in most engines, the design of the compressor shrouds includes brazed stators, material thickness changes, flanges and other features that obscure or shadow the abradable seal material. In 1982, a holographic NDT technique entered production at Pratt & Whitney, combining time average holography with a low frequency ultrasonic vibration (Figure 1) applied to the compressor shroud (Figure 2). Holography provided excellent disbond detection (Figure 3) with easily interpreted images essentially identical to ultrasonic test results, but not affected by part geometry or material thickness changes. Early systems used film holography with a one step chemical process, invented by the author, which produced production quality holograms in approximately 10 s (Newman, 1984). The results were viewed on a video monitor. Electronic holography currently using megapixel CCD cameras has radically improved system operation speed and reliability. Since 1982, holography has been the testing standard for metallic abradable and plasma sprayed aircraft abradable seals. Holographic testing has eliminated compressor seal bond failures, yielded large financial savings to the manufacturers and greatly enhanced customer satisfaction and cost savings. Similar applications of holography with vibration part excitation of bonded

Figure 3 Holographic image of a turbine engine compressor showing disbonds as black areas on the compressor seal material. Test time is approximately 1 s per image or about 25 to 60 s per part, depending on diameter. metallic materials on human orthopedic implants have shown dramatic improvement in product quality. Highly automated systems that monitor all system parameters have been FDA approved. Together, these two applications of holography have yielded significant cost savings, increased manufacturing quality and provided a means for engineering improvements to processes.

SHEAROGRAPHY
The concept of using a common path interferometer to image test part deformation derivatives to overcome the effects of environment vibration and loss of the discontinuity signal due to gross part deformation, as seen with thermal stress holography, was first introduced by Butters and Leendertz (1971) and reduced to practice by Nakadate and Saito (1985). Shearographic cameras generally use a Michelson type interferometer, as shown in Figure 4, with two essential modifications. First, one mirror may be precisely tilted to induce an offset, or sheared image, of the test part with respect to a second image of the part. The sheared amount is a vector with an angle and a displacement amount. The shear vector, among other factors, determines the sensitivity of the interferometer to surface displacement derivatives.

Figure 1 Schematic of a holographic technique using low frequency ultrasonic part excitation to image braze bond discontinuities.

Figure 4 Schematic of a Michelson type shearographic interferometer observing a flat metal plate with a 102 mm (4 in.) diameter machined flat bottomed hole. A center load change on the plate provides a variable deformation, observed on the computer monitor in real time.

Figure 2 Metallic abradable seal material bonded to a turbine engine compressor shroud. This 12 stage also abradable seal material bonded to the inner diameter of the stators, making conventional ultrasonic testing impractical.

The two laser speckle images of the test part, offset by the shear vector, interfere at every paired point over the surface in the field of view. The single frequency laser light from the two sheared images of the part is focused onto the CCD camera array of photosensitive pixels. Light from pairs of points in each sheared image interfere. Each video frame, comprised of the complex addition of these two sheared images can be subtracted from a stored reference image. The absolute difference yields a fringe pattern observed on the monitor. The second mirror in the Michelson interferometer may be phase stepped using a piezoelectric device and the images combined to create a phase map. Further processing (Yang et al., 2004)
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using any number of unwrapping algorithms may be used to generate fringe free images of local surface deformation derivates. In practice, each step in creating a shearogram is performed automatically using image processing macros constructed by combining each processing function in a sequence. Shearography system operators perform a test with a single keystroke. Portable shearography systems using voice recognition commands have also been built, further freeing the operator from system functional operations. Quantitative Shearographic Measurements Precise calibration of the shearogram image scale (pixels/inch) and the shear vector allow further processing of shearography data to determine discontinuity indication dimensions, area and the deformation of the material. The digital measurement of the deformation derivative may be integrated to show the shape of the target surface deformation as well as the magnitude of the deformation at any location, as in Figure 5. Shearography can be used to measure the deformation response of a structure to an applied load and as a means of deriving material properties (Figure 6). Typical shearographic camera systems include a built in laser illumination source, the shearing interferometer, image processing computer and remote controls. These systems may be used alone with thermal or vibration stress or in test chambers with vacuum stress shearographic techniques.

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SHEAROGRAPHIC NDT SYSTEMS

Shearographic NDT systems are either portable, for on vehicle or structural testing, or fixed production systems using gantries to scan large panels or structures. As with all laser devices, exposure of the operator to laser emissions must be tightly controlled and in compliance with state and federal laws. Lasers interlocked to test cell doors or vacuum attachment features are an important design feature. Portable Shearographic NDT Systems Portable shearographic systems generally are either tripod mounted or attached in some manner to the test object. Portable systems use laser diodes and various means such as vacuum changes, thermal flux or vibration to stress the object surface to detect subsurface discontinuities. Shearographic techniques using portable systems are excellent for engineered repairs in composite laminates. Figure 7 shows a repair to an aircraft laminate with far side, bonded stringers (diagonal linear features). The repair uses scarf plies built up thicker than the (c)

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(d) Figure 5 A phase map shearogram: (a) with horizontal shear vector, yielding a fringe pattern showing the first derivative of the out of plane deformation, w/x; (b) using an unwrapping algorithm, the image shows the positive (white) and negative (black) slope change the metal plate with a 102 mm (4 in.) diameter flat bottomed hole was deformed by 7 m (2.8 10-4 in.); (c) the integrated image showing the out of plane deformation; (d) integrated images of deformations derived from shearographic data are free of errors due to gross object deformation or translation.
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Figure 6 A quantified measurement of the target deformation of 7 m (2.8 10-4 in.).

ably less expensive since precision part contour following is unnecessary. Currently, dozens of these systems are in operation on aerospace manufacturing programs.

HELICOPTER BLADE TESTING

Both metal and composite helicopter blades are easily tested in production with either thermal or vacuum shearographic methods. The pressure reduction during test cycles is between ambient and 2.1 kPa (0.3 lb/in.2) below ambient. Apache helicopter blade may be scanned in less than 15 min (Figure 8).

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Figure 7 Shearographic images: (a) engineered repair to a solid laminate aircraft structure with far side bonded stringers (porosity is circled); (b) thermal shearogram of an aircraft fairing showing layup of the composite material (thermal shearography is used for detection of disbonds and face sheet delamination).

(b) Figure 8 Helicopter blade testing: (a) discontinuity free honeycomb and trailing edge area; (b) shearographic indications of disbonds in this 610 mm (24 in.) section view. Discontinuties, such as crushed cores, disbonds and sheared cores, are easily detected and measured.

original material, hence the signal from the stringers appears to disappear under the repair. Visible also are areas of porosity (circled in white). Test time is 15 s. Portable shearography systems have seen extensive use in aerospace and marine composite testing since the introduction of the first systems in 1989. More than 170 composite boats and ships, including the Swedish Visby Naval Corvette ships measuring 73 m (240 ft), have used portable shearography systems. Portable shearography systems were also recently used to test the composite wind fairings covering the full 671 m (2200 ft) length of the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. Tripod mounted shearographic cameras are used frequently with thermal stress shearographic techniques. While thermography is sensitive to changes in surface temperature (or the derivatives of the temperature change), thermal shearography images changes in the thermal expansion of a structure. Damage, disbonds, foreign object damage or delaminations produce local changes in the coefficient of thermal expansion. Thermal shearography is not generally affected by variations in emissivity or paint on the test part surface. Fixed Production Shearographic Systems First introduced on the US Air Force B-2 production program, gantry mounted shearographic systems share many operational features with ultrasonic C-scan systems. These include: teach/learn part scan programming, electronic imaging of the entire part, image analysis, discontinuity measurement tools and automated operation. However, shearographic systems operate at throughputs typically in the range of 9.3 to 46.5 m2/h (100 to 500 ft2/h) compared to a typical throughput of 0.9 m2/h (10 ft2/h) for ultrasonic C-scan systems. In addition, gantries are consider-

PRODUCTION TESTING OF LAUNCH VEHICLE THERMAL PROTECTION MATERIALS

Rocket launch vehicles require extensive thermal protection systems to prevent damage from combustion flame and frictional aerodynamic heating during flight in the atmosphere as well as to conserve cryogenic propellants. Spray on foam insulation using polyurethane materials is used on both the space shuttle external tank and the Boeing Delta IV launch vehicle. For different reasons, reducing foam loss from these cryogenic fuel tanks is critical. While the launch vehicle does not carry a fragile payload vehicle in the foam debris path, loss of foam can affect the tank structure. In 1998, Laser Technology, Inc., developed an acoustic shearography technique to image disbonds and voids in the spray on foam insulation used on the aforementioned launch vehicle fuel tanks (Figure 9). Here, sonic frequency sound is used to excite the foam material. Disbonds and voids increase the local compliance of the foam on the substrate, allowing the foam to resonate when excited. Shearography was qualified through extensive testing of 0.6 by 0.6 m (24 by 24 in.) foam/substrate panels with programmed discontinuities. Tanks were tested manually and probability of detection analysis performed on both laboratory test setups and finally the production systems. The written test procedures were tested with multiple operators and the system shown to be robust, with highly reproducible results. In practice, shearography has been demonstrated to be a highly effective testing technique for spray on foam insulation. The results have allowed multiple process refinements leading to
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complex shapes and large areas at a high throughput without contamination of bonding surfaces. Shearographic NDT is an excellent choice for sandwich structures using foam or metal honeycomb cores. Fracture analysis techniques can be used to determine the maximum allowable discontinuity size. The use of test panels with programmed discontinuities and stepped face sheet thicknesses will then allow determination of the minimum discontinuity detectable as a function of face sheet thickness. Once qualified for an application, shearography can offer highly cost effective testing, even during ply buildup on the tool. Such techniques can yield zero discontinuity production by allowing testing, repair, retesting and application of more material during part manufacture. Shearographic NDT is used on many aircraft manufacturing programs.

CONCLUSION
Shearographic and holographic NDT techniques are mature and cost effective production NDT techniques for many aerospace applications. Shearography provides very rapid testing, allowing immediate feedback for process controls. Recent inclusion in SNT-TC1A will help further the development of new applications and methods. Figure 9 Acoustic shearogram showing triangular and square disbonds in 51 mm (2 in.) thick spray on foam insulation test panels. Test time for this 508 by 508 mm (20 by 20 in.) panel is 0.5 s.

REFERENCES
American Society for Nondestructive Testing, Recommended Practice No. SNT-TC-1A, Columbus, Ohio, ASNT, 2001. Butters, J.N. and J.A. Leendertz, Speckle Pattern and Holographic Techniques in Engineering Metrology, Optical Laser Technology, Vol. 3, 1971, pp. 26-30. Nakadate, S. and H. Saito, Fringe Scanning Speckle Pattern Interferometry, Journal of Applied Optics, Vol. 24, No. 14, 1985, pp. 2172-2180. Newman, J.W., Production Holographic Inspection of Turbine Aircraft Engine Components, Air Transport Association NDT Forum Proceedings, Washington, DC, Air Transport Association, 1984. Yang, L.X. and Y.Y. Hung, Digital Shearography for Nondestructive Evaluation and Application in Automotive and Aerospace Industries, 16th World Conference on NDT, Montreal, Canada, 30 August-3 September 2004.

improved foam application and reduced rework and costs. Test throughput using acoustic shearography is extremely high. The shearographic test system built for the launch vehicle operates at 111 m2/h (1200 ft2/h).

AIRCRAFT COMPOSITE STRUCTURAL TESTING

Since 1987, shearography has seen extensive implementation for aircraft composites testing. Shearography is capable of testing

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