Ultrasonic Nondestructive Approach on Fiber Orientation Inspection in CFRP Composite Laminates

Abstract

Owing to the advantages associated with their very large strength-to-weight and stiffnessto- weight ratios, composite materials are attractive for a wide range of applications. Increasingly, high performance engineering structures are being built with critical structural components made from composite materials. In particular, the importance of carbon-fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) has been generally recognized in both space and civil aircraft industries, and CFRP composite laminates are widely used. It is very important to detect fiber orientation error in orthotropic composite laminates because the layup of a CFRP composite laminates affects the properties of the laminate, including stiffness, strength and thermal behavior. In this study, a new approach was investigated on detection of fiber orientation with using two longitudinal and a shear wave ultrasonic transducers for the orthotropic composite laminates. During testing, the most significant problem is that the couplant conditions do not remain the same because of changing the viscosity of the couplant. Therefore, making a design for generating shear wave with longitudinal transducers would greatly aid in alleviating the couplant problem. A pyramid with an isosceles triangle was made of aluminum in order to generate shear waves using two longitudinal transducers based on ultrasonic-polarized mechanism. It is found that the shear wave was very sensitive to fiber of CFRP composite. Finally, a CFRP composite material was nondestructively characterized in order to measure fiber orientation error area using automated data acquisition C-scan system.