Ultrasonic Testing of Bonds on Aluminium Extruded Profiles

Abstract

The use of adhesion is increasing for a broad range of applications. Most of the focus is concentrated on the design of the products in order to have a sufficient bond area and reasonable load conditions. It is, however, also necessary to look on techniques to ensure that the quality of the bonding is high and reproducible. There are many factors that influence the quality of a bonding i.e. choice of adhesion, pre-treatment of aluminium and temperature. The aim of this study is to evaluate ultrasonic techniques for testing adhesion bonds of extruded aluminium profiles.

Results on calibration and „real“ samples are presented. It is shown that ultrasonic technique can be used to detect missing adhesive and to some degree bad bonding not caused by insufficient adhesive. The ultrasonic findings were compared with destructive evaluation and good correlation was found.