Inspecting Carbon Matrix Composites with Airborne/Conventional Ultrasound

Carbon/phenolic composite (CPC) materials have obvious advantages over conventional materials, which arc consisting of carbon fibers embedded in a carbon matrix. The CPCs have become to be utilized as parts of aerospace applications and its low density, high thermal conductivity and excellent mechanical properties at elevated temperatures make it an ideal material for aircraft brake disks. Because of permeation of coupling medium such as water, it is desirable to perform contact-less nondestructive evaluation to assess material properties and part homogeneity. In this work, a C/P(Carbon/phenolic) composite material was characterized with non-contact and contact ultrasonic methods using automated acquisition scanner. Also through transmission mode was performed because of the main limitation for air-coupled transducers, which is the acoustic impedance mismatch between most materials and air. Especially ultrasonic images and velocities for C/C(Carbon/Carbon) composite disk brake was measured and found to be consistent to some degree with the non-contact and contact ultrasonic measurement methods. Low frequency through-transmission scans based on both amplitude and time-of-flight of the Ultrasonic pulse were used for mapping out the material property inhomogeneity. Measured results were compared with those obtained by the motorized system with using dry-coupling ultrasonics and through transmission method in immersion. Finally, results using a proposed peak-delay measurement method well corresponded to ultrasonic velocities of the pulse overlap method.