Quantitative Assessment of Adhesively-bonded Joints Using Ultrasonic Guided Waves

Maintenance is a costly but vital part of an aircraft lifespan. Regulations demand scheduled and rigorous inspection to ensure safety and airworthiness in the long term. Studies estimate that up to a third of the total operational cost of an aircraft is spent in maintenance checks. Consequently, design choices are made to take into account these...

Lamb Wave Propagation in Sandwich Composite Structures for the Detection of Impact Damage

Lightweight composite sandwich structures are particularly susceptible to impact damage. Barely Visible Impact Damage (BVID) is known to affect the short and long term load bearing capacities of composite structures. Active acoustic Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems have the potential to detect such damages before they lead to...

Temperature effects on an Acoustic Emission based Structural Health Monitoring System: Applied to Composite Materials

Acoustic Emission (AE) based structural health monitoring systems have the potential to assess the state of metallic / composite structures and detect damage in real time as it grows. This is done by monitoring the Lamb waves that occur due to the release of energy and the specific boundary conditions. Environmental and Operational Conditions ...

Lamb wave detection in prepreg composite materials with fibre Bragg grating sensors

This paper demonstrates that existing Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques have potential during the production phase in addition to their application for maintenance and for in-flight monitoring. Flaws occur during composite fabrication in industry, due to an imperfect process control and human errors. This decreases production...