Modernisation of quality assurance through digital radiography

Only a comprehensive inspection guarantees that the parts can withstand the high requirements. Leading manufacturer of civil and military helicopters Airbus Helicopters from Donauwörth in Southern Germany performs a complete X-ray inspection of their production parts.

In the past, this has been done with an analogue imaging technique, a so-called image intensifier. As the X-ray inspection is a mandatory inspection step at the end of the production chain, a high system availability is necessary. A system failure would inevitably lead to a disruption in the process and directly impacts the production output.

The old system could not guarantee this availability anymore and an alternative had to be found within a very short timeframe. Another demand was to modernise the process through digitisation, which could be achieved through Digital Radiography (DR). The advantages of this technology are an easier certification, a simplified result-archiving and a clearly improved image quality.

After the investigation of several suppliers and solutions, VisiConsult was able to prevail with a new development against the competition: The specially developed HDMI image intensifier combines the advantages of a Digital Detector Array (DDA) with those of an analogue technique. Only with this technique the X-ray inspectors could test for example, the honeycomb structure of special rotor blades in motion without artefacts.

The flexibility of VisiConsult to react to special customer wishes and to find new ways led to this big project success within shortest time. Beside the aerospace industry, VisiConsult is also represented in a number of further industries, like foundries, pipe mills and automotive manufacturers. The innovative systems provide highest inspection quality as well as a high degree of automatisation, which helps customers to decrease costs.