Composite materials offer greater resistance to cracking than metals and much lower weight for a comparable strength. Composites are replacing metals in aircraft designs only when designers can be confident that the performance will be enhanced. That confidence depends on high-quality NDT information about the actual conformance of the material to the design – information which is relatively primitive and incomplete at present. The NDT of Composites team conduct research to develop novel non-destructive 3D characterisation methods to provide confidence in the quality of manufactured composites by detecting, measuring and mapping ply wrinkles, fibre waviness, porosity, variable fibre volume fraction, etc. Work in this research topic includes the development of a forward model of ultrasonic wave propagation within the composite structure and a multi-dimensional optimisation process for deriving parameters of interest e.g. layer thickness from experimental data. The team also conducts research to predict the structural integrity of non-optimal components containing these phenomena using NDT data as an input for the performance models.