The aerospace industry, as well as other industries requiring high-performance materials, are meanwhile manufacturing the majority of the components using composite materials. Some examples are printed circuit boards, rubber compounds, metal sandwich components, and carbon or glass-fiber reinforced plastics (with or without honeycomb or foam core). Due to the high quality standards and the applicable safety directives, highly precise and non-destructive test methods are indispensable for both manufacturing and maintenance.

The ease of use and easy adaptability to new components or materials make the shearography procedure quickly applicable. Already today, this method demonstrates its reliability and reproducibility of test results in many application areas - a fact which is of special importance, particularly in quality assurance.

Besides the detection of clearly visible defects (see image left above: hail damage), the actual size and relevance of defects in the deeper material layers, not visible to the human eye, are critical for the evaluation and assessment of material damage (purely visual or function-limiting/endangering).

With the ISIS shearography systems, in-service damage to components can be detected very quickly and unambiguously. They allow the timely detection of material defects, such as delaminations, air bubbles or inclusions of foreign particles, which contribute to the weakening of the component, before a major failure of the component occurs. The necessary corrective action can thus be taken early on, increasing process efficiency and saving costs.