The purpose of this exercise has been to ensure that (i) design stipulated standards are not deviated as far as possible. However, in case such deviations are noticed, corrective action is initiated immediately, (ii) sustained reproducibility of fabrication process is maintained with minimum level of rejection, and (iii) potentially harmful defects or state of damage/homogeneity, does not escape notice, while minor defects or deviations do not lead to unnecessary rejection or repair.

To serve above objective, state-of-art ultrasonic systems, were developed to provide, in real time, a two dimensional map of ultrasonic data specific to the scanned volume of material under test. The map is representative of the intensity of ultrasonic signal and the transit time. These two parameters provide two distinct and complementary maps that bring out features related to the objectives mentioned above.

Evaluated features like stiffness, thickness variations and nature, size and distribution of defects have been very close to expected and destructively measured values, for carbon-fibre- composites.

The paper describes features of the state-of-art ultrasonic system, with five degrees of freedom for normal positioning of the probe, over a scan span of 6 meters x 5 meters, with the capability of moving the probe in raster scan in accordance with a pre-set surface geometry. In addition various results related to study of carbon-fibre-composites are also discussed.