Accelerated Aging Experiments for Prognostics of Damage Growth in Composite Materials

Abstract

Composite structures are gaining importance for use in the aerospace industry. Compared to metallic structures their behavior is less well understood. This lack of understanding may pose constraints on their use. One possible way to deal with some of the risks associated with potential failure is to perform in-situ monitoring to detect precursors of failures. Prognostic algorithms can be used to predict impending failures. They require large amounts of training data to build and tune damage model for making useful predictions. One of the key aspects is to get confirmatory feedback from data as damage progresses. These kinds of data are rarely available from actual systems. The next possible resource to collect such data is an accelerated aging platform. To that end this paper describes a fatigue cycling experiment with the goal to stress carbon-carbon composite coupons with various layups. Piezoelectric disc sensors were used to periodically interrogate the system. Analysis showed distinct differences in the signatures of growing failures between data collected at conditions. Periodic X-radiographs were taken to assess the damage ground truth. Results after signal processing showed clear trends of damage growth that were correlated to damage assessed from the X-ray images.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2011
Accession Number
ADA584693

Entities

People

  • Abhinav Saxena
  • Cecilia C. Larrosa
  • Fu-Kuo Chang
  • Kai Goebel
  • Surajit Roy
  • Vishnuvardhan Janapati

Organizations

  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Composite Materials
  • Composite Structures
  • Damage Detection
  • Data Analysis
  • Detectors
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Manufacturing
  • Materials
  • Measurement
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Monitoring
  • Stiffness
  • Structural Health Monitoring
  • Wave Propagation
  • X Rays

Readers

  • Reinforced Composite Materials
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Space