Reflectivity and emissivity analysis of thermoplastic CFRP for optimising Xenon heating and thermographic measurements

The demand for efficient composite production processes is growing as the proportion of composites in modern aircraft increases. Particularly, thermoplastic composites are interesting for sustainability and cost efficiency. They can be manufactured using deposition methods, which involve heating by radiation in the visible and near-infrared...

Investigations on Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods for the deep learning classification of fibre layup defect in the automated composite manufacturing

Automated fibre layup techniques are widely used in the aviation sector for the efficient production of composite components. However, the required manual inspection can take up to 50 % of the manufacturing time. The automated classification of fibre layup defects with Neural Networks potentially increases the inspection efficiency. However,...

Transducer Placement Option of Lamb Wave SHM System for Hotspot Damage Monitoring

In this paper, we investigated transducer placement strategies for detecting cracks in primary aircraft structures using ultrasonic Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The approach developed is for an expected damage location based on fracture mechanics, for example fatigue crack growth in a high stress location. To assess the performance of the...

Simulation and detection of flaws in pre-cured CFRP using laser displacement sensing

The novelty of the research is the detection of different types of flaws in the prepreg carbon fibre-reinforced fibres (CFRP) layup compared to in cured products. This paper presents the development of a new method for in situ detection of prepreg CFRP production flaws combining laser displacement sensors and analytical modelling. Experimental...

Optical coherence elastography for measuring the deformation within glass fiber composite

Optical coherence elastography (OCE) has been applied to the study of microscopic deformation in biological tissue under compressive stress for more than a decade. In this paper, OCE has been extended for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, to deformation measurement in a glass fiber composite in the field of nondestructive testing. A...

Signal processing in optical coherence tomography for aerospace material characterization

Based on a customized time-domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) system, a series of signal processing approaches have been designed and reviewed. To improve demodulation accuracy and image quality, demodulation approaches such as median filter, Hilbert transform, and envelope detector were investigated with simulated as well as experimental...