Aircraft structures designed and certified to the damage-tolerance requirements must beinspected periodically for cracks. These inspections usually result in significant aircraftdowntime and may be expensive to implement. In order to reduce the cost of inspections,without compromising aircraft safety, the use of low-frequency eddy-current (LFEC) nondestructiveinspection (NDI) techniques is being investigated. The use of this technique hasthe potential of significantly increasing inspection intervals for some structural details.Unfortunately there is a lack of a sufficient statistical database of crack detection capabilityfor the LFEC NDI. That database is needed in order to implement, with a reasonablereliability, this NDI method for damage tolerance certification. This study estimates theLFEC NDI statistical parameters of crack detection probabilities, which are essential in orderto implement this NDI method benefits to the damage-tolerance considerations for a validinspection interval determination.
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