Effect of Thermal Properties on Delaminated Fibre Metal Laminate

An attempt is made to analyse the effect of variation in thermal properties in Fibre Metal Laminate with an implanted delamination. This work focuses to explore the variations in thermal contrast for the increase in values of thermal properties of delamination, Aluminium layers and glass reinforced epoxy layers. The paper projects the numerical investigations towards the thermal analysis of fibre metal laminates based on a type of infrared Thermography named Step Pulsed Active thermography. The results conclude that the strong dependency of thermal contrast is mainly based on thermal conductivity of delaminated material, and Aluminium layers but less dependent on specific heat and density for barely Aluminium layers. The supplementary conclusions are arrived that the specific heat and density of Aluminium layers only show less significant in reporting the changes in results but they do not make considerable changes for delamination. A complementary conclusion of the glass fibre epoxy layers confirms that none of thermal properties variations does make meaningful change in thermal contrast in both reflection mode and transmission mode. The empirical relationship is made to find the exact variation of thermal contrast with change in thermal properties to study the future case problems related to delaminated fibre metal laminates. Thus, the analyses conclude that step pulsed active thermography in both reflection and transmission modes are more sensitive with the variation in thermal conductivity of delamination and Aluminium layers. Keywords— FML, SPAT, Thermal contrast, Thermal properties, reflection mode and transmission mode.