Structural bonding is increasingly supplementing and replacing mechanical fasteners because of the potential to reduce weight, part count, and assembly time in addition to the reduction in stress concentrations and ability to bond complex geometries that are not feasible with mechanical fasteners. Despite the advantages of structural bonding over mechanical fasteners, structural bonding is challenging to inspect and introduces new failure modes into structures.
Significant work on techniques for inspection of bond-lines has been performed. Ultrasonic techniques using externally mounted actuators and sensors have consistently found that shear waves and antisymmetric guided waves were the most sensitive to flaws in bond-lines. Recent work has also focused on using resonant frequencies and electromechanical impedance methods with internally embedded transducers to inspect bond-lines for damage.