Influence and compensation of temperature effects for damage detection and localization in aerospace composites

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP) has become, recently, in a promising methodology for the field of Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI), specially based on Ultrasonic Guided Waves (UGW), particularly Lamb waves using Piezoelectric Transducers (PZT). However, the Environmental and Operational Conditions (EOC) perform an important role on the physical characteristics of the waves, mainly the temperature. Some of these effects are phase shifting, amplitude changes and time of flight (ToF) variations. In this paper, a compensation method for evaluating and compensating the effects of the temperature is carried out, performing a data-driven methodology to calculate the features from a dataset of typical temperature values obtained from a thermoset matrix pristine plate, with a transducer network attached. In addition, the methodology is tested on the same sample after an impact damage is carried out on it, using RAPID (Reconstruction Algorithm for Probabilistic Inspection of Damage) and its geometrical variant (RAPID-G) to calculate the location of the damage.