Nico Brosta

Mr. Nico Brosta


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

1Year (2026-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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26 February 2026 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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KJKevin Jacob
Kevin Jacob
Benjamin StrassBenjamin Strass
Benjamin Strass
NBNico Brosta
Nico Brosta
JPJaqueline Presti-Senni
Jaqueline Presti-Senni
In this paper, a method for determining the filling level of grooves (1 mm (W) × 0.25 mm (H)) in pressed titanium pipe-fitting joints is presented. The joints are inspected in a water bath using a 20 MHz phased array ultrasound, and the acquired raw B-scans are evaluated by a convolutional neural network that performs per-groove regression. Reference filling levels are obtained destructively from micrographs. Compared to X-ray computed tomography and destructive sectioning, the proposed approach overcomes the low material contrast between pipe and fitting, avoids long scan times, and enables a nondestructive, potentially inline-capable quantitative assessment of sub-millimeter grooves. A manual high-frequency ultrasound evaluation with a single probe and conceivable rule-based time-of-flight pipelines with hand-crafted echo picking and thresholds both show only moderate agreement with CT references and require substantial feature engineering for multiple echoes. In contrast, the PAUT-CNN method exploits the full raw B-scan without explicit feature design and achieves a root mean square error of about 7% of the groove filling levels on a held-out test set, corresponding to an absolute error on the order of a few tens of micrometers in groove height. This demonstrates that high-frequency phased array ultrasound combined with data-driven evaluation can quantitatively assess the filling of sub-millimeter grooves in aerospace-relevant press-fit connections.