Research in Nondestructive Evaluation Methods for Materials State Awareness

The scope of this program is to further the capabilities of the United States Air Force to perform enhanced and improved Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of aerospace structures and components, which is a critical technology for the manufacture, lifing, and sustainment of USAF assets. The contractor will be required to perform basic, applied, and advanced research and development in support of the Materials & Manufacturing Directorate, Materials State Awareness Branch (AFRL/RXCA), to promote discovery and provide increased accuracy, precision, reliability, and optimization of the material state of aerospace materials, such as those, but not limited to, materials manufactured from polymer matrix composites, ceramics and ceramic-matrix composites, metallic alloys, and hybrid systems.

Nondestructive Evaluation methods of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: electromagnetic methods across a wide range of frequencies including eddy current and terahertz technology, ultrasonic testing including phased array and laser-based methods, x-ray methods including computed tomography and radiography, thermal-based method, whole-field resonance-based methods, microscopy-based methods such as optical, acoustic, ion and electron microscopy and imaging, analytical methods derived from these aforementioned technology such as chemical, crystallographic, and defect mapping, and combinations thereof.

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