Advanced X-Ray Tomographic Methods for Quantitative Characterisation of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymers

In recent years, a strongly growing demand of aeronautic industry for light weight materials like carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRP) motivated by economic and environmental issues is observed. The main interest of using CFRP composites is based on weight reduction, and on the high fatigue resistance capabilities. The next generation aircrafts, as the Airbus A350 XWB aim to be made of more than 50 % of composite materials. However with the increase of the composite share the efforts for non-destructive testing are exploding. X-ray computed tomography (CT) is to date a very promising method for non-destructive and fully three dimensional characterizations of composite aeronautic components. CT provides a volumetric map of a specimen including internal and external 3Dstructures, generated from a set of radiographs. This paper covers the quantitative characterization of CFRP parts by advanced X-ray computed tomography and data analysis methods. The discussed topics are: High resolution CT, phase contrast CT, quantitative evaluation of fibre length and orientation distribution of fibres, quantitative determination of porosity and interactive exploration and visual analysis of porosity.