FAREWELL COQTEL

On December 10th, 2024, COQTEL project’s members held their final meeting at the prestigious “école des Arts et Métiers” in Paris. We take this opportunity to look back on this project, which acronym means: Corrosion Quantification Through Extended use of Lamb waves. The aim of the project is to offer a non-destructive solution for monitoring the evolution of corrosion defects on structures, to estimate their remaining lifetime. The goal is to optimize civil transportation aircrafts maintenance, which corrosion cost is estimated at 2.2 billion EUR in 2016 in Europe alone. Using an embedded method, based on actual structure wearing, is more efficient and less constraining than a programmed maintenance with manual and tedious inspections means. With our LWDS electronics, the consortium showed that 10ths-micron corrosion defects could be detected and localized within a centimeter precision. LWDS could also be configured to “listen” to metal corrosion in real time, which creates small pulses due to the growth of hydrogen bubbles in the metal. Project team members combined the LWDS with a controlled corrosion generation unit, which is a world premiere in this field. Thanks to the project’s members’ diligence and expertise, COQTEL brought significant breakthroughs to corrosion monitoring and paves the way for innovative and sustainable solutions for aeronautics and beyond.

Discover more about this exciting project and explore the challenges ahead on the dedicated website.