Tungsten carbide inclusions in gas turbine engines.

Manufacturing anomalies introduced during machining of critical parts, although rare in occurrence, have become a significant cause of gas turbine disk cracking events in the aero-engine. One of these anomalies is tungsten carbide particles possibly being embedded into the work-piece of nickel or tungsten alloys by tool breaking. Due to their crack initiating potential they have to be detected and localized reliably. This paper presents electromagnetic methods for solving this task.