Non-destructive Methods for Damage Assessment of Composite Sandwich Structures

Sandwich structures are capable of absorbing large amounts of energy under impact loads which results in high structural crashworthiness. Comparison of detection capabilities of selected C-scan NDT methods applicable for inspections of sandwich structures was performed using water-squirt, air-coupled and pitch-catch ultrasonic techniques, supplemented by laser shearography. Test results have shown that water-squirt and pitch-catch techniques are the most suitable methods for the core damage evaluation. Air-coupled method showed lower sensitive for detection of some artificial defects and impact damages in honeycomb sandwiches when unfocused transducers were used. The combination of the presented methods was able to reveal most of the defects