Assessing Bonded Area Quality of Carbon Fiber Lenticular Ribs with Lock-in Thermography

Innovative materials, like shape-memory and smart materials, offer new possibilities for the aerospace industry, but their unique properties and defects require specialized testing methods. Non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques, like thermographic-based NDT, are promising for inspecting these materials without damaging them. The study focuses on the application of Lock-in Thermography (LT) to evaluate the quality of the bonded area of Carbon Fibre Lenticular ribs for deployable antenna structures used in space applications. LT is cost-effective and requires a relatively simple set-up. The results of this work showed that LT successfully detects various types of defects in both the bonded area and the lenticular area of the components.