Evaluating delamination growth in composites under dynamic loading using infrared thermography

Abstract

In this paper, a method has been developed to use thermography for the quantitative analysis of a delamination area under dynamic loading. To demonstrate this method, a coupon was developed with double shear configuration and an initial delamination consisting of a PTFE insert. The coupon was tested under fatigue loading and an infrared (IR) camera was used to monitor the thermal response and delamination growth of the coupon during loading. The data from the thermal camera was processed in 2 steps, firstly a fast Fourier transform (FFT) was used to transform the raw data from time domain to frequency domain. In the second step, FFT thermographs were further processed using an image segmentation algorithm. Here, the thermal plots are segmented to separate the delaminated and un-delaminated areas. By computing the number of pixels in the delaminated region, the area of delamination was obtained at each cycle and has been plotted against the cycles to failure. The strain energy was computed with the help of force and displacement data from the test machine. Such signals allowed computing the fatigue propagation curves and understanding the fatigue behaviour of the test samples. This method looks promising and can be extended to test samples that cannot be tested by conventional testing methods