Ultrasonic inspection technique for NDE of fiber composite materials

The constant growth of air traffic leads to increasing demands for the aircraft industry to manufacture airplanes more economically and to ensure a higher level of efficiency, ecology and safety. During the last years important improvements for fuselage structures have been achieved by application of new construction principles, employment of sophisticated and/or alternative materials, and by improved manufacturing processes. In particular the intensified application of fibre-reinforced plastics components is in the focus of current discussions and research. The main goal of an ongoing national project is to improve the existing ultrasonic test technology in such a way that it is optimally suited for the examination of CFRP multilayer structures. The B-Scan and C-Scan results are then used for the visualization of individual layers and the complete layer set-up. First results of the project revealed that with carefully selected transducers and frequencies it is possible to detect defects and irregularities in the layer structure like delaminations, fibre cracking, ondulations, missing layers etc. and even to visualize the fibre orientations in the individual layers.