TOMSK, July 11. /TASS/. Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) has created an improved version of a Russian defectoscope for the control of aircraft composite materials. It allows using temperature to detect hidden damage, the university's press service said on Tuesday.

"Scientists of the School of Non-Destructive Testing at Tomsk Polytechnic University have developed a new, improved version of the flaw detector for aviation. This is the fifth modification of the domestically produced device, which allows to conduct thermal nondestructive testing of monolithic composite materials, honeycomb aircraft panels and composite sandwich panels used in aircraft construction. It can be used to detect shock damage, delaminations, foreign inclusions in polymer composites, as well as water in aviation honeycomb panels and delaminations of various kinds of coatings," the report says.

According to the scientists, the method of active thermal control consists in pulse heating of the object surface to acceptable temperatures and registration of changes in the temperature of the object. Thermophysical properties of hidden defects differ from the properties of the basic material. They manifest themselves in the form of local thermal anomalies of surface temperature, which are recorded in the form of color thermal images.

The flaw detector is equipped with a tablet computer with a program for collecting and processing infrared thermograms. The device uses mainly Russian components. It can be used both in manual mode and as part of a robotic system.

"When developing the new version of the flaw detector, not only did we take into account successful foreign practices, but also used our best technical solutions for the development of flaw detectors," said Professor Vladimir Vavilov, head of the research and production laboratory of thermal control at Tomsk Polytechnic.

The research was supported by grants from the Russian Science Foundation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, as well as the Priority 2030 program of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science.