Abstract
The development in materials technology has produced stronger, lighter, stiffer, and more durable electrically insulating composites which are replacing metals in many applications. These composites require alternative inspection techniques because the conventional nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques such as thermography, eddy currents, ultrasonic, X-ray and magnetic particles have limitations of inspecting them. Microwave NDT technique employing open-ended rectangular waveguides (OERW) has emerged as a promising approach to detect the defects in both metal and composite materials. Despite its promising results over conventional NDT techniques, OERW microwave NDT technique has shown numerous limitations in terms of poor spatial resolution due to the stand-off distance variations, inspection area irregularities and quantitative estimation in imaging the size of defects. Microwave NDT employing OERW in conjunction with robust artificial intelligence approaches have tremendous potential and viability for evaluating composite structures for the purpose mentioned here. Artificial intelligence techniques with signal processing techniques are highly possible to enhance the efficiency and resolution of microwave NDT technique because the impact of artificial intelligence approaches is proven in various conventional NDT techniques. This paper provides a comprehensive review of NDT techniques as well as the prospect of using artificial intelligence approaches in microwave NDT technique with regards to other conventional NDT techniques.
Highlights
The developments of imaging techniques for investigating physically inaccessible objects have been a topic of research for many years and have found widespread applications in the field of nondestructive testing (NDT)
There is a wide range of commonly used NDT methods and well established in the industry such as thermography inspection, ultrasonic inspection, eddy currents testing, X-ray and magnetic particles inspection [3], [4]
The results have shown the ability of this technique to detect delamination of depth as low as 1 mm
Summary
The developments of imaging techniques for investigating physically inaccessible objects have been a topic of research for many years and have found widespread applications in the field of nondestructive testing (NDT). Thermography technique is considered as one of the most widespread in NDT due to the fast inspection, high imaging resolution and defect detection sensitivity. The technique provides several advantages which are a non-contact inspection to be used in an abnormal temperature environment, couplant is not needed, defect detection and imaging. Ultrasonic shows robust defect detection in the low porous materials and the small size of the inspected specimens. As a near field technique, there are several factors influence the defect detection capability such as frequency point and stand-off distance which is the distance between the probe and the specimen to be inspected. The proposed method eliminates the process of selecting the optimal frequency points for both phase and magnitude imaging technique and shows a promising result for various stand-off distance.
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