Investigation of pre-treatment processes and surface monitoring techniques for structural assembly by adhesive bonding

Overhead presentation. There is increasing demand of structural adhesive bonding in competition to other joining methods such as thermal joining, mechanical joining, hybrid joining. The AbiTAS (Advanced Bonding Technologies for Aircraft Structures) project has the target to develop a robust, flexible, economical process chain for structural assembly by adhesive bonding.Two topics within ABiTAS are presented in the paper: Surface pre-treatment of robot-compatible technologies (laser, plasma, media blasting) and online monitoring of surface quality. It can be shown, that AP-Plasma is appropriate for pre-treatment of CFRP and the aerosol wetting technique surface sensitive. Effects of plasma treatment on surfaces have been detected. For technical surface states thresholds of mean drop diameter can be defined. These thresholds are useful to characterize technical surface states.