Shearography non-destructive testing and defect characterisation of thick composite structures

THICK composite materials, e.g., thickness of more than 50 mm, are increasingly being used across diverse industry sectors owing to their significant advantages of weightsavings, superiormaterial properties and load-carrying capability. These materials tend to be adopted in safety-critical applications such as large primary or secondary load...

Towards safe shearography inspection of thick composites with controlled surface temperature heating

Thick glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) composites, e.g. thickness of more than 50 mm, are increasingly used in a wide variety of industries, particularly in the marine and wind energy sectors. Defect detection and characterisation in these composites remain appealing challenges due to the material complexity and the presence of various...

FEM-assisted shearography with spatially modulated heating for non-destructive testing of thick composites with deep defects

This study aims at improving shearography non-destructive testing (NDT) of deep defects in thick composites with thermal loading. Instead of conventional global heating (GH), the core idea is to apply novel spatially modulated heating (SMH) for shearography NDT. In this paper, the finite element method (FEM) has been used to advance...

Absorption of high concentration NH3/H2O in a plate heat exchanger

High concentration NH3/H2O is suitable for Kalina cycles used for the recovery of low grade heat. Plate heat exchangers (PHEs) are compact and reduce the charge of working fluid. This work investigates the absorption of NH3/H2O in a PHE, which has a weight concentration of 96%. Being different from normal absorption systems, the concentration...

Tuning the charge density wave and superconductivity in CuxTaS2

We report the characterization of layered 2H-type CuxTaS2 for 0?x?0.12. The charge density wave (CDW), at 70 K for TaS2, is destabilized with Cu doping. The sub-1 K superconducting transition in undoped 2H-TaS2 jumps quickly to 2.5 K at low x, increases to 4.5 K at the optimal composition Cu0.04TaS2, and then decreases at higher x. The...