Characterization of Impact Damage in Composite Plates

Abstract

Low-velocity impact on composites typically produces a barely visible damage at the impacted surface. The internal defects can be complex, consisting of multimode damage and the extent of the impact damage normally spreads across the thickness under the impacted surface. The characterization of impact damage in composites can be very complicated and varies for every different composite structure. In this paper, independent characterization of the low-velocity impact damage on carbon-fiber/epoxy plates using three different non-destructive evaluation methods were used. The goal is to demonstrate the ability of guided ultrasonic waves imaging technique and compared to the more widely employed techniques such as X-ray imaging and ultrasonic immersion C-scan. It was demonstrated that the low frequency A0 guided ultrasonic wave mode generated by a low-cost piezoelectric transducer can be successfully employed to detect impact damage in composite plates and managed to estimate the size and shape of the impact damage.