A Past, Present, and Prospective Review on Microwave Nondestructive Evaluation of Composite Coatings

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the use of composite coatings for numerous applications, including aerospace, aircraft, and maritime vessels. These materials owe this popularity surge to the superior strength, weight, stiffness, and electrical insulation they exhibit over conventional substances, such as metals. The growing demand for such materials is accompanied by the inevitable need for fast, accurate, and affordable nondestructive testing techniques to reveal any possible defects within the coatings or any defects under coating. However, typical nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques such as ultrasonic testing (UT), infrared thermography (IRT), eddy current testing (ECT), and laser shearography (LS) have failed to provide successful results when inspecting composite coatings. Consequently, microwave NDT techniques have emerged to compensate for the shortcomings of traditional NDT approaches. Numerous microwave NDT methods have been reported for composite coatings inspection. Although existing microwave NDT methods have shown successful inspection of composite coatings, they often face several challenges, such as low spatial image quality and extensive data interpretation. Nevertheless, many of these limitations can be addressed by utilizing microwave NDT techniques with modern technologies such as soft computing. Artificially intelligent techniques have greatly enhanced the reliability and accuracy of microwave NDT techniques. This paper reviews various traditional NDT techniques and their limitations in inspecting composite coatings. In addition, the article includes a detailed review of several microwave NDT techniques and their benefits in evaluating composite coatings. The paper also highlights the advantages of using the recently reported microwave NDT approaches employing artificial intelligence approaches. This review demonstrates that microwave NDT techniques in conjunction with artificial intelligence approaches have excellent prospects for further enhancing composite coatings inspection and assessment efficiency. The review aimed to provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of most NDT techniques used for composite materials alongside their most salient features.

A Compact Laser Shearography System for On-Site Robotic Inspection of Wind Turbine Blades

Shearography is an optical technique in the field of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of various materials. Its main advantages are that it is non-contact type and can cover a large area in a single inspection. As a result, although it has been widely acknowledged as an effective technique particularly for NDE of composite materials to detect subsurface defects such as delamination, disbond, cracks and impact damages, the use of shearography for on-site inspection of wind turbine blades (WTBs) has not been reported. This is due to wind causing structural vibration in the WTB. The solution in this paper is to make the shearography sit on the WTB during inspection when the WTB is parked, so that the relative motion between the shearography and the WTB is minimized within the tolerance of the shearography system. The ultimate goal of the solution is to enable a robot assisted shearography system to inspect the WTB on-site. This paper presents the research work on a new shearography design for integration with a robotic climber for on-site WTB inspection. The approach is tested and evaluated in experimental settings, and comparative assessment of the approach with other robotic NDE techniques is carried out. The results demonstrate the potential benefits and suitability of the approach for on-site robotic inspection of WTBs.

Non-destructive Methods for Damage Assessment of Composite Sandwich Structures

Sandwich structures are capable of absorbing large amounts of energy under impact loads which results in high structural crashworthiness. Comparison of detection capabilities of selected C-scan NDT methods applicable for inspections of sandwich structures was performed using water-squirt, air-coupled and pitch-catch ultrasonic techniques, supplemented by laser shearography. Test results have shown that water-squirt and pitch-catch techniques are the most suitable methods for the core damage evaluation. Air-coupled method showed lower sensitive for detection of some artificial defects and impact damages in honeycomb sandwiches when unfocused transducers were used. The combination of the presented methods was able to reveal most of the defects.