Progress beyond the state-of-the-art

The vast majority of the available literature about composite patch repairing refers to aluminium structures in the aerospace sector where the thickness of patches is very small (usually less than 3 mm). Few real applications have been documented on steel structures in the civil engineering and shiprepair industries in Europe, the USA and the Far East. Thus, the aerospace industry provides a very significant knowledge data base, from where basic repair principles can be extracted, which can be effectively used in applications of this repair technology to other industries.