Determination of the Minimum Number of Inspections Necessary for Establishing of the Barely Visible Impact Damage Size in Composite Aeronautical Structures

This article investigates the dependence between the method of statistical data processing and the necessary amount of experimental studies required for empirical determination with a given level of reliability of the impact surface dent visual detectability threshold in composite aeronautical structures. Two methods for determining the minimum detectable damage size are considered, one of which is based on using a binomial distribution, and the other, on bootstrap modeling. A comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the two methods is carried out. As a result, it is shown that the bootstrap method gives significantly less scatter of the estimates and allows reducing the number of experts involved by more than by half with the same accuracy of the estimates.