In the production of aircraft the use of carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) is constantly increasing. This is because of their outstanding mechanical properties with regard to e.g. specific weight and strength, as well as the possible flexibility in design, such as joining numerous different metallic parts into one single CFRP component. However, the possibility of designing very streamlined and highly integrated parts comes along with structures that are more and more complicated in function and shape, as a single CFRP component covers tens or even hundreds of metallic parts in conventional aircraft design. This complexity in shape poses ever increasing difficulties for the non destructive verification of the integrity of the structure. This holds especially true for components of helicopters, as they usually consist of a variety of sharply bended, very complex, multiaxially shaped parts (see Fig. 1). Increasing attention is paid nowadays also to the porosity content, due to its high impact on the strength of the component and consequently on the weight of the structure. A key issue is here to find appropriate material property indicators that describe the material properties on one hand, and can easily be measured on the other.
展开▼
