Advanced Ultrasonic Non-destructive Evaluation for Metrological Analysis and Quality Assessment of Impact Damaged Non-crimp Fabric Composites

Composite materials are nowadays massively utilized in a very large number of industrial applications. Thus, it has become essential to characterize the service behaviour they can provide depending on their working conditions. In this paper, the study of the influence of impact conditions on damage generation in high performance composite materials, consisting of non-crimp fabric composite laminates, is carried out through the application of an advanced ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation technique, known as full volume ultrasonic scanning. This technique is based on the pulse-echo immersion testing method and allows for the quantitative analysis of the internal material structure in the entire composite volume. The aim of the ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation analysis is the metrological characterization of the non-crimp fabric composite laminates in terms of actual thickness estimation and stacking sequence fiber orientation verification as well as their quality assessment in terms of impact damage development within the whole composite material volume.