Polyester resin based glass fiber reinforced composite panels obtained from a local windmill turbine blade part manufacturing company are used to evaluate the performance of inter-digital transducer (IDT) surface wave transducers. Interaction of surface waves with fiberglass layers is addressed in this work. Additionally, artificially created flaws such as cracks, impact damage and delamination are also studied in terms of amplitude changes in order to attempt to quantify the size, location and severity of damage in the test panels. As a potential application to the structural health monitoring (SHM) of windmill turbine blades, the coverage distance within the width of the sound field is estimated to be over 80 cm when a set of IDT sensors consisted of one transmitter and two receivers in a pitch-catch mode.

Date Published: 18 April 2011
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7983, Nondestructive Characterization for Composite Materials, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Infrastructure, and Homeland Security 2011, 79830Q (18 April 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.881227

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7983:
Nondestructive Characterization for Composite Materials, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Infrastructure, and Homeland Security 2011
H. Felix Wu, Editor(s)