Philippe Guy

Non‐Destructive Evaluation of Damage and Failure of Fibre Reinforced Polymer Composites Using Ultrasonic Waves and Acoustic Emission

Applications of reinforced composites and heterogeneous solids are widespread, spanning technological areas of various aerospace and mechanical industries. A real challenge concerning these materials is their life time prediction when subjected to wide variety of environmental and mechanical loading conditions that can initiate damage and lead to failure. Indeed, damage at the smallest scales drives damage accumulation at larger length scales until some critical local damage state is attained that causes macroscopic failure. A key issue in predicting life time is to characterise distributed volumic and localised damage and to understand the mechanisms of its initiation, evolution and criticality and so, the identification of relevant precursors of failure. To answer to these questions, volumic and guided ultrasonic waves and acoustic emission are of particular interest. As a matter of fact volumic ultrasonic wave propagation is sensitive to homogeneously distributed microcracks and represents in that case a good damage indicator. Guided waves as Lamb waves especially when generated from inside the material using an inserted piezoelectric element offer a specific sensitivity to localised damage as cracks or delaminations. Besides, acoustic emission which corresponds to the energy released by the material during the damage processes is directly related to the damage mechanisms and so can give pertinent information about the damage initiation and development. In this paper, our aim is to show in the one hand the ability of volumic ultrasonic waves to characterise volumic damage of glass epoxy composites under hydrothermal ageing and also the ability of Lamb waves to detect and identify localised damage. In the other hand our purpose is to demonstrate the potentiality of acoustic emission in understanding the damage mechanisms that occurs during a tensile test of polymer fibre composites and to discriminate in real time the different types of damage occurring at the microscopic scale.

Long-term stability of normal condition data for novelty detection

As a technique of diagnosing failure in structures and systems, the method of novelty detection shows considerable merit. The basis of the approach is simple: given measured data from normal condition of the structure, the diagnostic system builds an internal representation of the system normal condition in such a way that subsequent departures from this condition can be identified with confidence in a robust manner. The success or failure of the method is contingent on the accuracy of the description of normal condition. In many cases, the normal condition data may have quite a complex structure: for example, an aircraft may experience a wide range of ambient temperatures in the course of a single flight. Also, the operational loads experienced by the craft as a result of flight manoeuvres may have wide-ranging effects on the measured states. The object of the current paper is to explore the normal condition space for a simple benchmark monitoring system. The said system uses Lamb-wave inspection to diagnose damage in a composite plate. Both short-term and long-term experiments are carried out in order to examine the variations in normal condition as a result of run-in of the instrumentation and variations in ambient temperature. The exercise is not purely academic as the fiber-optic monitoring system is a serious candidate for a practical diagnostic system.

Modelling the attenuation in the ATHENA finite elements code for the ultrasonic testing of austenitic stainless steel welds.

Multipass welds made in austenitic stainless steel, in the primary circuit of nuclear power plants with pressurized water reactors, are characterized by an anisotropic and heterogeneous structure that disturbs the ultrasonic propagation and makes ultrasonic non-destructive testing difficult. The ATHENA 2D finite element simulation code was developed to help understand the various physical phenomena at play. In this paper, we shall describe the attenuation model implemented in this code to give an account of wave scattering phenomenon through polycrystalline materials. This model is in particular based on the optimization of two tensors that characterize this material on the basis of experimental values of ultrasonic velocities attenuation coefficients. Three experimental configurations, two of which are representative of the industrial welds assessment case, are studied in view of validating the model through comparison with the simulation results. We shall thus provide a quantitative proof that taking into account the attenuation in the ATHENA code dramatically improves the results in terms of the amplitude of the echoes. The association of the code and detailed characterization of a welds structure constitutes a remarkable breakthrough in the interpretation of the ultrasonic testing on this type of component.

Characterisation of anisotropic elastic constants of continuous alumina fibre reinforced aluminium matrix composite processed by medium pressure infiltration

The anisotropic elastic properties of an Al metal matrix composite unidirectionally reinforced with continuous α-alumina fibres fabricated, by a medium pressure infiltration technique, has been characterised using ultrasonic bulk and surface waves, tensile tests and microstructural analysis. The ultrasonic data are analysed under the continuum mechanics approximation. Elastic anisotropy is studied by varying the direction of propagation of ultrasonic waves. An optimisation process is used to recover all the volumic effective elastic moduli from bulk ultrasonic velocities. Two local (sub-surface) shear effective moduli are determined from the surface waves velocities. To discuss the elastic anisotropy of the material in relation with its microstructure and the manufacturing process, microstructural observations are correlated to the global and local ultrasonic evaluations and to the mechanical characterisation conducted in and out of symmetry axis.

Measurement of ultrasonic scattering attenuation in austenitic stainless steel welds: realistic input data for NDT numerical modeling.

Multipass welds made of 316L stainless steel are specific welds of the primary circuit of pressurized water reactors in nuclear power plants. Because of their strong heterogeneous and anisotropic nature due to grain growth during solidification, ultrasonic waves may be greatly deviated, split and attenuated. Thus, ultrasonic assessment of the structural integrity of such welds is quite complicated. Numerical codes exist that simulate ultrasonic propagation through such structures, but they require precise and realistic input data, as attenuation coefficients. This paper presents rigorous measurements of attenuation in austenitic weld as a function of grain orientation. In fact attenuation is here mainly caused by grain scattering. Measurements are based on the decomposition of experimental beams into plane-wave angular spectra and on the modeling of the ultrasonic propagation through the material. For this, the transmission coefficients are calculated for any incident plane wave on an anisotropic plate. Two different hypotheses on the welded material are tested: first it is considered as monoclinic, and then as triclinic. Results are analyzed, and validated through comparison to theoretical predictions of related literature. They underline the great importance of well-describing the anisotropic structure of austenitic welds for UT modeling issues.

Theoretical and experimental responses for a large-aperture broadband spherical transducer probing a liquid–solid boundary

A theoretical analysis of a spherical focusing transducer for broadband acoustic microscopy is proposed. The originality of the present contribution is the particular attention we have paid to describe, as rigorously as possible, the diffraction phenomena. Our analysis starts in the harmonic domain with the well-known angular spectrum method, and then gets into the time domain. A new formulation of the angular spectrum in the focal plane has been obtained and compared to other expressions previously reported. This article is deliberately limited to isotropic semi-infinite plane reflectors in order to carry out the inverse Fourier transform in an analytical way. The analytical approach is helpful for the physical interpretation of particular interesting phenomena observed in the transient analysis. A new kind of contribution to the echographic response has been identified and named “geometrical edge waves.” The weight and the arrival time of each discontinuity of the impulse response is analytically evalua...

Damage Assessment in Smart Composite Structures: the DAMASCOS Programme

The DAMASCOS (DAMage Assessment in Smart COmposite Structures) project is a European Union funded program of work bringing together a number of academic and industrial partners throughout Europe. The aim of Damascos is to apply new ultrasonic detection and generation techniques integrated within the structure, together with advanced signal processing to realize damage assessment and ageing characterization in composite structures. This paper describes the background, experimental findings and future applications of the technology as the project moves into its final phase.

Health monitoring of smart composite structures using ultrasonic guided waves

The health of a structure depends on both the homogeneously distributed degradation of its mechanical properties during its life cycle and the presence of localised defects such as cracks or delaminations. The proposed non-destructive health monitoring method allows to recover both kinds of information using ultrasonic waves. To avoid traditional techniques limitations, such as coupling reproducibility for instance, we propose here to integrate a piezoelectric element into the plate-like composite structure. The element dimensions are determined in order to uncouple the frequency ranges of the thickness and radial vibration modes. The thickness mode is used to monitor the homogeneous ageing of the structure through electrical impedance measurement. As for the radial vibrations, they are used to generate and detect Lamb waves, which have the advantage of propagating over long distances and offering specific sensitivity of various modes to different kinds of defects. The present work focuses on this last application and studies the ability of the proposed technique to detect and identify defects such as low speed impact-induced delaminations and cracks incomposite plate-like structures.

Acoustic microscopy of functionally graded thermal sprayed coatings using stiffness matrix method and Stroh formalism

Acoustic microscopy of multilayered media as well as functionally graded coatings on substrate necessitates to model acoustic wave propagation in such materials. In particular, we chose to use Stroh formalism and the recursive stiffness matrix method to obtain the reflection coefficient of acoustic waves on these systems because this allows us to address the numerical instability of the conventional transfer matrix method. In addition, remarkable simplification and computational efficiency are obtained. We proposed a modified formulation of the angular spectrum of the transducer based on the theoretical analysis of a line-focus transducer for broadband acoustic microscopy. A thermally sprayed coating on substrate is treated as a functionally graded material along the depth of the coating and is approximately represented by a number of homogeneous elastic layers with exponentially graded elastic properties. The agreement between our experimental and numerical analyses on such thermal sprayed coatings with different thicknesses confirms the efficiency of the method. We proved the ability of the inversion procedure to independently determine both thickness and gradient of elastic properties. The perspective of this work is the opportunity to non-destructively measure these features in functionally graded materials.

Optimization of Signal Pre-Processing for the Integration of Cost-Effective Local Intelligence in Wireless Self-Powered Structural Health Monitoring

Recent research in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) showed the ability of guidedwave based sensors networks to detect, localize and classify damage in its early stage. But, most of them still require the wiring of numerous devices. To avoid this technical restraint, particularly in airborne structures, wireless SHM system offer mass and cost savings, but powering the devices remains heavy. In this paper, actuators and sensors are powered by piezoelectric microgenerators, which harvest energy from the environing mechanical stress. The efficiency of the extraction process is optimized by a non-linear processing of the piezovoltage named Synchronized Switch Harvesting. Previous work showed that such techniques provide a stand-alone power source, whose performances meet the requirements of Wireless Transmitters and Receivers. Indeed, each sensing node has to feature its own power source in order to acquire its logical autonomy and thus, provide decentralized intelligence to SHM network. Although the diagnosis will be centralized, the amount of data passed to the central core of the network should be reduced to preserve a positive energy balance of the node. Various algorithms are compared in terms of sensitivity and computational cost, the latter directly impacting the consumption.