Conventional and Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing for Composite Materials

Conventional single element ultrasonic testing as a general and promising method has been used and developed for flaw detection in composite materials. However, anisotropic nature of the composites has a big influence on the response signals and inspection procedure. Ultrasonic phased array technique can have a series of ultrasonic elements from 16 to as many as 256 or even more and is able to pulsing each small individual elements separately, as a result, more signal focusing, wide range of beam angle and sweeping characteristics of the beam can be achieved and this makes the ultrasonic phased array method an alternative but more powerful solution for composite material inspection. In this research conventional and phased array ultrasonic tests were used for detection of flaws in various composite materials. Flaws with different sizes and locations were evaluated by these both methods at various beam characteristics. Results were compared in terms of strength of signal, accuracy and response resolution.