The US Air Force needed to improve their inspection/maintenance process. In particular they wanted to improve their monitoring of inspection coverage, their trending inspection data across multiple aircraft and the communication between the inspection, engineering and maintenance groups. Utilizing our unique data management technology we are developing solutions to these problems for the inspections that generate digital data. By aligning the data to the CAD model of the aircraft, we are able to quickly identify regions of missed inspection coverage. Additionally, by aligning the data we are inherently also aligning any inspector-made indications which makes visualizing and reporting trends simple.

New aircraft with composite structures require more involved analysis and design process during inspection and repair. The US Navy needs to streamline the current manual process used to accurately locate structural damage areas on structural CAD models. SDL is working with the Navy to develop a simple photogrammetric approach to identify damage which has been marked on a structure and automatically and accurately locate that damage on a 3D CAD model.

Our technology developed for the US Air Force and Navy can also be applied to the manufacturing industry. Aligning inspection images to the 2D/3D CAD model of the part being manufactured and mapping the data onto the model itself provides a number of benefits. These benefits include the ability to perform defect trending across various parameters, such as time of manufacture, manufacturing line, and so on. Additionally, any damage or defects can also be accurately mapped onto a CAD model of the part, allowing further investigation through analysis packages and other methods. Finally, our tools provide the capability to search through the inspection data easily to identify interesting trends, allowing for the creation of custom reports addressing specific issues.

We provide a series of steps to our customers to allow you to evaluate our solution at minimal risk. The first stage is a cost free assessment of a sample of your data. If we determine that our solution is a good fit for your process, we will provide you a quote for a full scale demonstration. During this time we will perform the necessary setup to process a set of your historical data, providing you with standard reports to demonstrate the capabilities of our system. In the final stage we can either provide a web-based SDL hosted solution or deliver a hardware-software inspection data management system.

A white paper with more information can be found here.