Nondestructive Evaluation of Fiber Waviness in Thick Composites by Ultrasonics

초음파를 이용한 두꺼운 복합재료의 보강섬유 굴곡 평가

In this study, the numerical and experimental investigations were conducted to understand ultrasonic wave propagation and to evaluate the degree of fiber waviness in thick composites nondestructively. The path, energy and traveling time of insonified wave were predicted by adopting the ray and plane wave theories. In the analysis, the composites were assumed to have continuous fiber with sinusoidal waviness in a matrix and were modeled as stacks of infinitesimally short length off-axis elements with varying fiber orientation along the length direction. From the experiments on the specially fabricated thick composite specimens with various degrees of uniform fiber waviness, the energy distributions of received wave were obtain for the various positions of transmitter. It was observed that the energy of wave was converged to the adjacent peaks of fiber waviness. The location where maximum energy of wave was detected from the experiments showed good agreement with the location obtained from theoretical predictions. Finally, the test procedure was Proposed to evaluate fiber waviness in thick composites by considering the energy of wave and relative distance between transmitter and receiver.