|
With over seven million departures per year, air transportation has become not a luxury, but a standard mode of
transportation for the United States. A critical aspect of modern air transport is the jet engine, a complex engineered
component that has enabled the rapid travel to which we have all become accustomed. One of the enabling technologies for
safe air travel is nondestructive evaluation, or NDE, which includes various inspection techniques used to assess the health or
integrity of a structure, component, or material. The Engine Titanium Consortium (ETC) was established in 1993 to respond
to recommendations made by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Titanium Rotating Components Review Team
(TRCRT) for improvements in inspection of engine titanium. Several recent accomplishments of the ETC are detailed in this
paper. The objective of the Engine Titanium Consortium is to provide the FAAand the manufacturers with reliable and costeffective
new methods and/or improvements in mature methods for detecting cracks, inclusions, and imperfections in
titanium. The consortium consists of a team of researchers from academia and industry-namely, Iowa State University,
Allied Signal Propulsion Engines, General Electric Aircraft Engines, and Pratt & Whitney Engines-who work together to
develop program priorities, organize a program plan, conduct the research, and implement the solutions. The true advantage
of the consortium approach is that it brings together the research talents of academia and the engineering talents of industry to
tackle a technology-base problem. In bringing industrial competitors together, the consortium ensures that the research
results, which have safety implications and result from FAA funds, are shared and become part of the public domain.
|
