Surface wave utility in composite material characterization

A surface wave velocity measurement technique is used to supply supporting measurements in the computation of elastic constants for practical nondestructive evaluation of composite materials. Theoretical modeling work is carried out to illustrate the surface wave velocity changes as a function of angle with respect to the axes along the fibers of a unidirectional graphite epoxy composite material for a variety of different problems, including porosity (PC) changes, fiber volume fraction (FF) changes, and delamination. Experiments are conducted on two unidirectional reinforced composites and a (0–90)_s cross ply graphite epoxy laminate to illustrate the surface wave velocity measurements and the inverse computation procedure for evaluation of the stiffness coefficients. Variations of the feature values in the stiffness matrix are also discussed for inhomogeneities, delaminations through cracking, and large defects.This paper was presented at the Symposium of Wave Propagation in Structural Composites at Berkeley, American Soceity of Mechanical Engineering AMD Volume 9D, June 20–22, 1988.