ALPHASENSE, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A16-012

Description

A bore evacuator is generally used in gun barrel of armored fighting vehicles to help prevent poisonous propellant gases from venting back into the fighting compartment. It consists of a ring of holes drilled into the barrel, surrounded by a cylindrical pressure reservoir. Under typical operating conditions, pitting corrosions and stress corrosion cracks can form in the inner walls of those drilled holes. Current methodsare time consuming and labor intensive. Additionally, the detection of stress corrosion cracks is often plagued/hindered by the pitting corrosions coexisting in the holes of the bore evacuator. In the proposed program, AlphaSense details the development of a novel multimodal inspection tool to detect and quantify the cracks present in the internal surfaces of holes in the bore evacuator. If successful, the merits of the proposedinspection toolinclude the following: a) Compact, lightweight, and low cost, b) High inspection throughput, c) High sensitivity for crack detection, d) Capable of differentiating between pitting corrosions and cracks, and e) Capable of inspecting both straight and angled holes.