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A major area of concern in today’s Air Force is an aging air fleet. This has been further stressed by former Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Mark Welsh III at the 2015 AFA Air Warfare Symposium and his remarks still are true to this day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnKV-Op6Gbw
As an aircraft ages from use, it becomes more susceptible to structural failure. Non-destructive testing also known as (NDT) is done to catch cracks that begin to form or already have formed, which can then be repaired. One of the common types of NDT is called eddy current testing also known as (ECT). ECTs have issues when rough surfaces appear on an airframe, thus time must be taken to smooth down rough surfaces to get a clear signal of defects using ECT. In addition, ECTs must be calibrated to determine cracks of different sizes, thus multiple passes must be done to see various crack sizes. In addition, an ECT screen is not trivial with the output as a signal line, not a surface map, leading to another issue of human error in its interpretation.
We have a patent pending solution for a faster, easier, and error reducing non-destructive technique that can be supplemented into the maintainer’s toolbox. This novel technology makes use of a nanotechnology called quantum dots, the same technology used for your new QLED TVs. These tiny nanomaterials are less than half the size of a small viral particle. They demonstrate strain properties allowing us to use them as strain sensing color changing paint. In this animation here, strain is applied over time and you can clearly see changes in the emission peak (with our lab setup’s sensitivity here of at least sub-micron resolution). One of the near-term applications can be in quality assurance testing on a variety of surfaces, such as 3D printed materials! For airframes, airmen would only need to hold a camera to the surface of interest while the system takes in all of the strain information and shows it on a screen to the operator. We envision being able to see cracks as a full image with minimal work needed by the operator to accurately determine where cracks are starting to form or are already forming.
Having been validated in a laboratory environment, this technology is presently at a technology readiness level 4. Funding is needed to have our government laboratories and universities to further develop this optical strain-sensing technology. Then, we can start applying this as a quality assurance tool for military parts. Finally, a campaign of testing must be done to ensure the reliability of bringing in a new NDT to be used on operational aircraft before bringing this through policy for implementation. We need your support to take this all the way to be fully tested in the field and have use in supporting our warfighters.
| Date Taken: | 08.03.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 08.19.2020 12:41 |
| Category: | Briefings |
| Video ID: | 763960 |
| VIRIN: | 200803-F-TH808-1001 |
| Filename: | DOD_107950703 |
| Length: | 00:02:59 |
| Location: | ALBEQUERQUE, NM, US |
| Downloads: | 4 |
| High-Res. Downloads: | 4 |
This work, Spark Tank 2021 Video Presentation, by Bryan S Ripple, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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