Today’s aerospace composites manufacturers rely on end-of-line NDT inspection. It’s expensive, slow, and performed only after every value-adding step is complete. When defects are found at the end, all the material, time, and energy invested in that part is wasted.
Up to 30%
composite products scrapped
Downtime from NDT queue =
15-20%
of total manufacturing time
The Bullfrog Process:
Why Now?
42,000 new aircraft by 2046.
The global fleet is about to double.To meet this demand, manufacturers must achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in composite production rates.
But there’s a problem: a 10-30× increase in production rates demands a 60-180× decrease in inspection times. Current NDT methods cannot scale. New inspection technology isn’t a nice-to-have - it’s quickly becoming a forcing function.
Funded by the ATI SME Programme.
Technology Overview
We don’t win by making end-stage NDT a little bit faster. We win by moving inspection in-process so defective parts never proceed through expensive downstream steps.
Bullfrog uses active thermography to deliver fast, low-cost, non-contact inspection that can be embedded directly into existing manufacturing lines. Our end-to-end system handles everything from scan to decision support, automatically.
