Ultrasonic testing using couplants is most popular technique for non destructive testing of solid materials. In the most non – destructive evaluation tasks such as investigation of materials whose properties may be changed by liquid contact this technique can not be used. Use of contact technique can be restricted for complex geometry structures. Also, liquid couplants cannot be used when mater...

This past year there were a total of 14 faculty members involved in 40 sponsored research projects. Sponsors included government agencies, navy labs and industry. In addition to the sponsored faculty research there were 15 midshipmen involved in independent research projects with faculty, four of which were Bowman Scholars. Many of these projects were also funded by outside sponsors. Overall, 2...

With increased use of composite materials in critical structural applications it is more important than ever to independently assure structural integrity. Complexity of the advanced composite materials including layered and bonded structures represents challenges in developing optimized ultrasonic tests. Traditional ultrasonic NDT methods are inappropriate and often misleading when applied to a...

In general the ultrasonic testing is used for flaw detection and localization in tested materials. Flaws in materials are commonly characterized in measured ultrasonic signals by faults echoes. Ultrasonic signals measured on materials with coarse grained structure contain relative high level of noise. This undesirable part of ultrasonic signal should be reduced to make the fault echo detection ...

The modern aircrafts are built using various composite materials such as carbon/glass fibre reinforced plastics, GLARE and honeycombs. Manufacturing technologies of composite materials are complicated and include many stages. Small deviations from the technology parameters may cause relatively small defects, but influence of these defects on a total strength of a construction may be essential. ...

The increasing use in the industries of composite materials implies finding a suitable way for testing and evaluating them. Non-destructive testing by ultrasounds is an appropriate method to detect defects in this type of materials, however, because of their structure it is required to find the most applicable and accurate process for detecting flaws and anomalies in them. For conventional ultr...