Non-Destructive Evaluation of Defects and Damage in Composite Materials and Structures

The mechanical behaviour of composite materials differs from that of conventional structural materials owing to their heterogeneous and anisotropic nature. Different types of defects and anomalies get induced in these materials during the fabrication process. Further, during their service life, the components made of composite materials develop different types of damage. The performance and life of such components is governed by the combined effect of all these defects and damage. While porosity, voids, inclusions etc., are some defects those can get induced during the fabrication of composites, matrix cracks, interface debonds, delaminations and fiber breakage are major types of service induced damage which are of concern. During the service life of components made of composites, one type of damage can grow and initiate another type of damage. For example, matrix cracks can gradually grow to the interface and initiate debonds. Interface debonds in a particular plane can lead to delaminations. Consequently, the combined effect of different types of distributed damage causes the failure of the component. A set of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods is well established for testing conventional metallic materials. Some of them can also be utilized for composite materials as they are, and in some cases with a little different approach or modification. Ultrasonics, Radiography, Thermography, Fiber Optics, Acoustic Emision Techniques etc., to name a few. Detection, evaluation and characterization of different types of defects and damage encountered in composite materials and structures using different NDE tools is discussed briefly in this paper.

Combining data sets of satellite-retrieved products for basin-scale water balance study: 2. Evaluation on the Mississippi Basin and closure correction model

In this study, we applied the integration methodology developed in the companion paper by Aires (2014) by using real satellite observations over the Mississippi Basin. The methodology provides basin-scale estimates of the four water budget components (precipitation P, evapotranspiration E, water storage change Delta S, and runoff R) in a two-step process: the Simple Weighting (SW) integration and a Postprocessing Filtering (PF) that imposes the water budget closure. A comparison with in situ observations of P and E demonstrated that PF improved the estimation of both components. A Closure Correction Model (CCM) has been derived from the integrated product (SW+PF) that allows to correct each observation data set independently, unlike the SW+PF method which requires simultaneous estimates of the four components. The CCM allows to standardize the various data sets for each component and highly decrease the budget residual (P - E - Delta S - R). As a direct application, the CCM was combined with the water budget equation to reconstruct missing values in any component. Results of a Monte Carlo experiment with synthetic gaps demonstrated the good performances of the method, except for the runoff data that has a variability of the same order of magnitude as the budget residual. Similarly, we proposed a reconstruction of Delta S between 1990 and 2002 where no Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment data are available. Unlike most of the studies dealing with the water budget closure at the basin scale, only satellite observations and in situ runoff measurements are used. Consequently, the integrated data sets are model independent and can be used for model calibration or validation.