Design for Inspection - Evaluating the Inspectability of Aerospace Components in the Early Stages of Design

One important part of the manufacturing process of aerospace components is making inspections using Fluorescent Penetrant Inspection (FPI). This mandatory inspection represents a non-negligible part of the manufacturing and service cost. It is therefore important to make the geometry of the components suitable for inspection i.e. practicing Design for Inspection (DFI). This has been studied at an aerospace company with the aim of bringing DFI to the early stages of product development process. In this paper, a tool is proposed for the evaluation of inspectability in the early design stages. The tool is applied on CAD-models of the components automatically ranking the inspectability of design proposals using a novel inspectability index. Thus, inspectability can be considered together with other performance and manufacturing aspects forming a powerful decision support. The tool has been run and evaluated together with manufacturing staff at the aerospace company with promising results. © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 27th International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing.