Non-Destructive Inspection of Impact Damage in Composite Aircraft Panels by Ultrasonic Guided Waves and Statistical Processing

Abstract

This paper discusses a non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technique for the detection of damage in composite aircraft structures following high energy wide area blunt impact (HEWABI) from ground service equipment (GSE), such as heavy cargo loaders and other heavy equipment. The test structures typically include skin, co-cured stringers, and C-frames that are bolt-connected onto the skin with shear ties. The inspection exploits the waveguide geometry of these structures by utilizing ultrasonic guided waves and a line scan approach. Both a contact prototype and a non-contact prototype were developed and tested on realistic test panels subjected to impact in the laboratory. The results are presented in terms of receiver operating characteristic curves that show excellent probability of detection with low false alarm rates for defects located in the panel skin and stringers.

An Energy-Based Concept for Yielding of Multidirectional FRP Composite Structures Using a Mesoscale Lamina Damage Model

“…In MD FRP composite laminates, matrix yielding/cracking and interface delamination are observed as the early damage mechanisms due to very low stiffness/strength properties of the matrix and interface (10%-20%) compared to the fiber properties level [10,[47][48][49][50]. In addition, the variation of through-thickness lamina orientations in an MD composite facilitates matrix failure and multi-delamination events at the early stage of the loading [10,43,45,51]. In some cases, the MD FRP composite structure was able to sustain up to 10-fold higher loading above the level corresponding to the onset of matrix and interface damages [10,43,45].…”

Short and Long Term Measurements in Assessment of FRP Composite Footbridge Behavior

“…These results are easily available in many journals and selected recent examples of this research can be found in references [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Similar papers dealing with problems on a slightly bigger scale (aircraft panels) are available in references [19,20].…”

IQ signal based RFID sensors for defect detection and characterisation

“…The feature extraction of transient response can be performed by exploiting the characteristics of the signal such as root mean square (RMS), variance, kurtosis, skewness [13] etc. However, previous researches in RFID based sensing only focus on transient response and first order differential features, e.g.…”