Prebond Inspection Techniques to Improve the Quality of Adhesive Bonding Surface Treatments

摘要

Adhesively bonded repairs to metallic aircraft structure can be used in a variety of applications to solve difficult maintenance issues where traditional mechanically fastened repairs are often unsatisfactory. For example bonded repairs have been applied to reduce stress intensity in fatigue prone areas of aircraft and, thereby, extend service life of the component, providing substantial maintenance savings. Despite their valuable contribution to aircraft maintenance, bonded repairs are treated as fail-safe items when used on primary aircraft structure. One of the reasons for the lack of credit for bonded repairs is the absence of a reliable non-destructive inspection (NDI) technique that can guarantee bond quality and strength. One solution to reduce this problem is the development of objective prebond inspection techniques that can guarantee the quality and reliability of the critical surface treatment process applied prior to the adhesive bonding operation. The use of a gloss-meter unit and surface quality monitor to quantify the prebond condition of metallic substrates is an effort to further improve the reliability and reproducibility of current bonding operations.