Application of Digital Shearography Technique for Crack Inspection in Carbon-Fiber and Glass-Fiber Reinforced Polymers

Nowadays composite structures have found many applications in sensitive and crucial industries such as aeronautic, military, and bio-engineering due to their individual characteristics. These usages have led to more demand for integrity assurance of these structures, in another hand, one of the most important properties of a material is its detectability or in other words their ability to be NDT. In this regard, it is essential to have reliable NDE techniques for the evaluation of these structures. Conventional NDT methods have some disability in inspecting these materials so that the novel techniques such as optical methods are considered more than before. Shearography is a full-field, non-contact, and high-speed method based on laser light in order to inspect composites and polymeric materials. In this research, several specimens of carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) and carbon fiber reinforced polymers (GFRP) with different sizes of cracks have been inspected. Also, the important parameters of shearography like loading size, shear distance, and direction for both materials have investigated.

Keywords:

shearography , laser interferometry , crack detection , CFRP , GFRP