Getting the Most Out of Industrial CT Scanning

Industrial CT analysis software uncovers aerospace manufacturing defects that scanning alone might miss.

Quality assurance and flight certification of critical aerospace parts and assemblies have reached new levels of sophistication in recent years. Leading aerospace and defense manufacturers worldwide now consider computed tomography (CT) scanning to be an essential part of their non-destructive testing (NDT) toolkit. Far more powerful than the CT used to scan the human body, industrial CT can penetrate almost every material, from superalloys to lead, revealing hidden details that previously could only be found by cutting and destroying finished parts.

However, because scanning is always performed after manufacturing, CT-image inspection alone without further analysis can lead to over- or under-estimation of the significance of visible anomalies. This can lead to high rejection rates, time-consuming corrective measures, or the addition of excess weight to designs - all negatives in expensive aerospace projects.