TWI will be showcasing its latest aerospace inspection software at the prestigious Paris Air Show later this month.

The organisation's Port Talbot based Technology Centre is set to join Welsh Aerospace and the Welsh Government in the UK Pavilion to launch a new software platform with live demonstrations of advanced non-destructive testing techniques, including full matrix capture (FMC), and virtual source aperture (VSA).

According to Regional Manager Philip Wallace, exhibiting at the Paris Show is an opportunity to display the Centre’s innovative inspection tools to a wider audience and engage with a wide range of industry contacts and potential customers, who are looking to overcome the inspection challenges faced by the aerospace industry.

Mr Wallace said, "TWI Technology Centre (Wales) is at the forefront of advanced ultrasonic inspection. By bringing our latest developments to the Paris Air Show we can demonstrate our software using the PeakNDT pulser/receiver. We are able to perform real-time inspection with FMC and provide fully calibrated B, C, and D-scan visualisation. The software is able to cope with complex curvature and internal anisotropy such as that found in composite and additive manufactured components."

Full matrix capture

TWI's latest innovation is full matrix capture (FMC) - an advanced ultrasonic technique developed as an evolution of phased array ultrasonic testing. While conventional phased array uses complex focal laws to steer and focus sound beams to a specific point in a component, FMC is able to focus simultaneously on every point within an area of interest, generating a clear, accurate image of the component.

FMC can be used on complex curved surfaces and runs on TWI-developed advanced processing algorithms that produce immediate results at up to 100 frames per second. Intuitive 3D viewing software makes analysis quick and easy, and data are stored for more detailed offline analysis.

Virtual source aperture

Virtual Source Aperture (VSA) is a cutting-edge ultrasound imaging technique, where an array transducer is used to emulate the sound field that would be produced by a virtual point source. This method uses fewer firings than an equivalent FMC inspection, dramatically reducing inspection times while suffering very little degradation in image quality.