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Concerning impacts (e.g. hail, stone chipping, bird strike or burst tyre), structures made from fibre-reinforced plies have their weakness at the interlaminar boundary layers. There-by delaminations, separation of layers that is, may occur, which are often not visible from the outside. That is why such components often have to be costly tested—contradicting the economic and ecological benefit of lightweight materials.
Commonly, wave fields propagating through the sample are used for non-destructive test-ing (NDT). This is known from pointwise ultrasonic testing, where the test head scans a local restricted region. Hence, a scanning method, e.g. via phased arrays, is required to inspect a large surface. More time-efficient are techniques based on guided waves, with a wide-range propagation. In fact, this is the intrinsic motivation of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für zerstörungsfreie Prüftechnik (DGZfP) to certify guided waves methods for NDT. Within this project, we aim to make such methods practicable and easy to use to encourage further applications…read more