NDE of FRP Composites Using Acousto-Ultrasonic Technique

Abstract

The application of FRP composite materials to civil aircraft structures and power plants represents one of the most significant improvement available to engineering in recent time. And the usage of FRP composite materials in various aerospace structures with confidence is possible, only when suitable NDE methods are developed for ultimate performance prediction.

A non-destructive testing, using acousto-ultrasonic (Model AET-206 AU) was used to evaluate the ultimate performance of unidirectional glass fibre reinforced plastic and hybrid glass/carbon fibre reinforced plastic composites. Because, it is the holistic approach of finding out how defects interact with the microstructural environment within the material. For obtaining the relationship between ultimate tensile strength of GRP, hybrid glass/carbon fibre composite and stress wave factor and for obtaining confidence level simple library programme were feed into ICL 1900 computer. Students values of 14.75 of GRP and 9.54 of hybrid glass/carbon fibre composite for the regression coefficient is moderately high, indicating that the coefficient can not be zero. These results help in prediction of the ultimate tensile strength with required degree of confidence. The results indicate that the higher value of stress wave factor correspond to higher the ultimate performance of the FRP composites. And the mode of failure of the GRP and hybrid glass/carbon fibre composites were studied by Zoom microscope for verification of the ultimate performance of composites.