The Opportunity

This pre-competitive project will develop key enabling solutions to facilitate the desired application expansion of titanium by addressing the current NDT limitations. The consortium of SMEs will receive a competitive advantage when tendering for the growing €450m inspection budget financed by European material manufacturers and aircraft operators, by offering novel techniques and equipment; adding value to their product range. The abrupt rise in inspection capability will deliver an increased capacity to reliably detect smaller defects at an earlier stage of the manufacturing process. Additionally, the Qualit-Ti technology will ensure that the number of defective items missed during manufacture and subsequently finding their way into in service components will be reduced by more than 3 orders of magnitude. This is illustrated in Figure 1, which also shows how value is added throughout the production process. Obviously detecting defects in the latter stages of production is a high cost to the component manufacturers, which must be passed on to the engine manufacturers, airlines and eventually the fare paying public. The QualiTi system will detect 50% more defects in the 1st stage of production that means that less defective parts progress to the latter stages and therefore less high value scrap is produced. Figure 2 shows a disk that cracked whilst in-service. The crack had propagated from a manufacturing induced defect that remained un-detected. The extent of damage that arises from such a failure is also pictured. This type of defect will be detectable with QualiTi system.

Some 85 airlines operate across the breadth of Europe and carry more than a billion passengers each year on a huge range of aircraft types. The pan-European character of the industry and the associated titanium suppliers require a trans-national approach to address pan-European needs. The wide-ranging origins, and hence cultural and practical familiarity, of the consortium SMEs, Large Enterprises (LEs) and RTDs will aid innovation and provide a natural transfer of technical skill, knowledge and experience throughout Europe.

The SMEs affiliated to this project represent the primary and emerging NDT technologies and have a long tradition of service to the manufacture and application of conventional flaw detection. The SME partners form a supply chain that includes manufacturing NDT instrumentation, supplying NDT mechanics, NDT software and general NDT services to industrial enterprises across Europe. This project provides the opportunity for participating SMEs to increase their presence in both the European and world-wide titanium and aerospace inspection markets. Technology transfer will take place through horizontal activities into the other major NDT techniques users, e.g. the medical, food hygiene (packaging), surface transport, nuclear and power generation sectors and into other engineering materials.

Figure 1. Shows that the Quali-Ti system will detect defects significantly earlier in the production process and will reduce the likelihood of defective parts entering service to just 3 parts per million. Data derived from personal experience in industry.

Figure 2. (a) Shows a cracked disk propagating from a defect that was not detected during the manufacturing process and (b) an engine failure that was fortunate not to result in the loss of the airframe..