Ultrasonic Measurements of Porosity in Woven Graphite Polyimide Composites

Thumbnail Image
Date
1988
Authors
Hsu, David
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Authors
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Series
Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation
Center for Nondestructive Evaluation

Begun in 1973, the Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) is the premier international NDE meeting designed to provide an interface between research and early engineering through the presentation of current ideas and results focused on facilitating a rapid transfer to engineering development.

This site provides free, public access to papers presented at the annual QNDE conference between 1983 and 1999, and abstracts for papers presented at the conference since 2001.

Department
Abstract

A method for evaluating the porosity volume content in composite laminates using the slope of the ultrasonic attenuation with respect to frequency has been reported before in these proceedings1,2. The method was first applied to laminates laid up from unidirectional prepreg tapes and has now been extended to the case of woven composite laminates. It was found that a linear relationship still holds between the porosity volume fraction and the attenuation slope; however, the constant of proportionality is quite different for the case of woven laminates. This difference is attributed to the differences in pore morphology in the woven and nonwoven laminates. Qualitatively, the voids are flatter and longer (needle-like or strip-crack-like) in the interlaminar region of nonwoven laminates of unidirectional prepregs and are very effective in blocking the sound energy. On the other hand, voids tend to be localized in the resin-rich pockets of woven laminates and remain spherical, as shown in Fig. 1. The attenuation and the slope of the attenuation are therefore lower (by about a factor of 2) in the woven composite for the same amount of porosity content. Quantitatively, the “void content-attenuation slope” relationship is modeled for both woven and nonwoven laminates in terms of the scattering amplitude of P-waves from voids of different shapes.

Comments
Description
Keywords
Citation
DOI
Keywords
Copyright
Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 1988