Deformation Analysis of Impact Damaged Composite Tube Using Thermal Shearography

Composite materials are widely used as structural materials for aerospace engineering because of its excellent mechanical properties such as light weight, high stiffness, and low thermal expansion. In driving, impact damage is one of the common but dangerous damages, caused by internal failure of the laminas interface which is not detected by in the surface. Many techniques to detect defects or delaminate between laminates have been reported. Shearography is a kind of laser speckle pattern interferometry with the advantages of non-destructive, non-contact, high resolution and displacement slope measurement. In this paper, the shearography is used to evaluate non-destructively impact damaged surface of the composite material and a measuring method using shearography for the thermal deformation of a impact damaged composite material is discussed. The basic principles of the technique are also described briefly.