Billet Inspection

• Significant quantity of real hard alpha for examination and destructive analysis to enhance inspection and further reduce the risk of inflight failures
• Real defects available to enhance understanding of effect of forging on defect morphology and inspectability throughout the production process
• Detailed analysis will allow future techniques that better address hard alpha inspectability (with assistance from modeling)
• Provides realistic and economical reference samples for assessment of future inspection technologies
• Provides substantial data as basis for POD studies of various UT techniques in a timely and economic manner

Objectives

• To provide a quantitative assessment of various ultrasonic approaches to billet inspection
• To provide basic knowledge to improve the detection of hard alpha by developing an understanding of the acoustic, physical and chemical properties of hard alpha
• To provide reference samples containing naturally occurring hard alpha defects for evaluation of future inspection techniques, validation of POD and UT methodologies, and support of technology transfer to titanium billet suppliers
• To support the development of a probabilistically-based damage tolerance design code to augment the current safe-life philosophy for life management of commercial aircraft turbine rotors and disks. (RISC)

Thanks to Lisa Brasche for the submitted material lbrasche@cnde.iastate.edu