Damage Detection and Identification in Composites

Vista Engineering Technologies will develop, validate, and deliver a portable system for assessing damage to composite aerospace structures that improves upon existing methods in terms of speed, accuracy, and cost, and then demonstrate the proof-of-concept system on test articles provided by the Air Force by determining the location and extent of damage in composite panels using a novel IR inspection technology. The output of the system will be fully automated. A system based on this technology called the IR Inspection System (IRIS) has been successfully demonstrated for detecting cracks and disbonding in small arms protection inserts (SAPIs), various types of vehicle ceramic armor plate, and a variety of multi-layer composites. The successful application of the technology is due to the novel methods of convectively and/or conductively heating the materials to be inspected to produce a thermal signature due to the defect. The success of the previous experimental measurements for SAPIs and the three-dimensional numerical heat flow modeling results for tongue and groove structures generated for this proposal indicate that very detectable thermal signals are produced with this method and are easily detected with a small, uncooled IR camera system.