Crack growth monitoring at CFRP bond lines

Abstract

With the growing need for lightweight technologies in aerospace and automotive industries, fibre-reinforced plastics, especially carbon-fibre (CFRP), are used with a continuously increasing annual growth rate. A promising joining technique for composites is adhesive bonding. While rivet holes destroy the fibres and cause stress concentration, adhesive bond lines distribute the load evenly. Today bonding is only used in secondary structures due to a lack of knowledge with regard to long-term predictability. In all industries, numerical simulation plays a critical part in the development process of new materials and structures, while it plays a vital role when it comes to CFRP adhesive bondings conducing the predictability of life time and damage tolerance. The critical issue with adhesive bondings is crack growth. In a dynamic tensile stress testing machine we dynamically load bonded CFRP coupon specimen and measure the growth rate of an artificially started crack in order to feed the models with the results. We also investigate the effect of mechanical crack stopping features. For observation of the bond line, we apply two non-contact NDT techniques: Air-coupled ultrasound in slanted transmission mode and active lockin-thermography evaluated at load frequencies. Both methods give promising results for detecting the current crack front location. While the ultrasonic technique provides a slightly higher accuracy, thermography has the advantage of true online monitoring, because the measurements are made while the cyclic load is being applied. The NDT methods are compared to visual inspection of the crack front at the specimen flanks and show high congruence. Furthermore, the effect of crack stopping features within the specimen on the crack growth is investigated. The results show, that not all crack fronts are perfectly horizontal, but all of them eventually come to a halt in the crack stopping feature vicinity.