Browsing by Author "Tzitzilonis, Vasileios"
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Item Open Access Autonomous inspection and repair of aircraft composite structures(Elsevier, 2018-11-23) Kostopoulos, Vassilis; Psarras, Spyridon; Loutas, Theodoros; Sotiriadis, George; Gray, Iain; Padiyar M, Janardhan; Petrunin, Ivan; Raposo Gaudencio Campos, Joao; Zanotti Fragonara, Luca; Tzitzilonis, Vasileios; Dassios, Konstantinos; Exarchos, Dimitrios; Andrikopoulos, George; Nikolakopoulos, GeorgeThis paper deals with the development of an innovative approach for inspection and repair of damage in aeronautical composites that took place in the first two years of the H2020 CompInnova project which. The aim is a newly designed robotic platform for autonomous inspection using combined infrared thermography (IRT) and phased array (PA) non-destructive investigation for damage detection and characterization, while integrated with laser repair capabilities. This will affect the increasing societal need for safer aircraft in the lowest possible cost, while new and effective techniques of inspection are needed because of the rapidly expanding use of composites in the aerospace industry.Item Open Access Autonomous systems thermographic NDT of composite structures(SPIE, 2019-05-02) Deane, Shakeb; Avdelidis, Nicolas Peter; Yazdani Nezhad, Hamed; Williamson, A.; Zhang, H.; Tzitzilonis, Vasileios; Maldague, Xavier P. V.; Tsourdos, AntoniosTransient thermography is a method used successfully in the evaluation of composite materials and aerospace structures. It has the capacity to deliver both qualitative and quantitative results about hidden defects or features in a composite structure. Aircraft must undergo routine maintenance – inspection to check for any critical damage and thus to ensure its safety. This work aims to address the challenge of NDT automated inspection and improve the defects’ detection by suggesting an autonomous thermographic imaging approach using a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) active thermographic system. The concept of active thermography is discussed and presented in the inspection of aircraft CFRP panels along with the mission planning for aerial inspection using the UAV for real time inspection. Results indicate that the suggested approach could significantly reduce the inspection time, cost, and workload, whilst potentially increase the probability of detection of defects on aircraft composites.Item Open Access Inspection of aircraft wing panels using unmanned aerial vehicles(MDPI, 2019-04-17) Tzitzilonis, Vasileios; Malandrakis, Konstantinos; Zanotti Fragonara, Luca; Gonzalez Domingo, Jose Angel; Avdelidis, Nicolas Peter; Tsourdos, Antonios; Forster, KevinIn large civil aircraft manufacturing, a time-consuming post-production process is the non-destructive inspection of wing panels. This work aims to address this challenge and improve the defects’ detection by performing automated aerial inspection using a small off-the-shelf multirotor. The UAV is equipped with a wide field-of-view camera and an ultraviolet torch for implementing non-invasive imaging inspection. In particular, the UAV is programmed to perform the complete mission and stream video, in real-time, to the ground control station where the defects’ detection algorithm is executed. The proposed platform was mathematically modelled in MATLAB/SIMULINK in order to assess the behaviour of the system using a path following method during the aircraft wing inspection. In addition, two defect detection algorithms were implemented and tested on a dataset containing images obtained during inspection at Airbus facilities. The results show that for the current dataset the proposed methods can identify all the images containing defects.