A riveting need

Aircraft — particularly passenger planes — use increasingly advanced technologies, but they are largely held together by good old rivets. Hundreds of thousands of them.

Checking the integrity of a riveted joint is crucial, and is still generally a manual operation. Now, however,

is working with the

to incorporate automatic rivet checking into the riveting operation itself.

To check a rivet, test engineers look at the rivet head to make sure it isn't scratched, and run their thumb over the joint to check how far each rivet protrudes from the surface. Particularly critical joints are checked using a dial gauge.

This type of inspection is thorough and reliable, but it's also very time-consuming. What's more, because the checks are made after all the joints have been riveted, a malfunctioning riveting machine might make many hundreds of defective joints before the problem is discovered.

The Fraunhofer team, based in