QUALITY CONTROL OF FIBER REINFORCED COMPOSITE MATERIALS USING ULTRASONIC C-SCAN METHOD

Abstract

In this study, composites were produced from carbon and glass woven fabrics, the most widely used fiber-reinforced composite materials, using the vacuum infusion method to examine the production defects of composite materials. The orientation of the matrix material (resin), one of the main components of the composites, on the reinforcement material was investigated by the ultrasonic Cscan method. Two types of samples were taken from the composite plates, from the center and the corner, and were examined with a pair of probes with a frequency of 3 MHz on an immersion type ultrasonic test operating according to the through-transmission method (TTU) principle. The first images obtained were arranged with the developed image processing algorithms. As a result of the examinations, non-homogeneous resin orientation was observed in the samples taken from the corners compared to the samples taken from the center of the plate. The details that could not be noticed in the raw images were clearly seen after the image processing steps. The method used and the developed image processing algorithms gave successful results in detecting the errors that occurred in the production process.