Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy for the inspection of dry fibre preforms

Abstract

Liquid moulded polymer matrix composites (LM-PMCs) are increasingly used in aerospace, automotive and other industrial applications. Liquid moulding processes featuring dry fibre preforms provide flexibility and enable cost reductions for secondary load-bearing structures. However, preform variability and manufacturing reproducibility remain major obstacles to wider use in primary structures. The open literature records only marginal use of non-destructive inspection (NDI) methods for dry multilayer preforms due to technological limitations and cost of NDI methods. In this work, terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) is used for inspecting three dry multilayer glass fibre preforms featuring different defects, for the first time. A novel time-domain enhancement method is compared with classical image processing methods, aiming at improving image contrast and detecting potential defects. Furthermore, THz B-Scan is used for verifying the accuracy of interply defect detection. Finite difference time domain is simulated for analyzing THz magnitude variation in time-domain. Finally, quantitative evaluation is applied to further illustrate the significant potential of THz-TDS for the inspection of dry fibre preforms. The results show that the errors on defects lengths, widths, angles, and diameters for THz-TDS are in the ranges 8.2 %–34.3 %, 18.67 %–75 %, 0.29 %–6.67 %, and 1.33 %–10 % respectively.