Step-heating thermography NDT for new composite high-speed rail carbodies

Abstract

The motivation of this paper is to explore the application of Step-Heating Thermography (SHT) as a technique capable of inspecting new composite rail carbodies using demanding requirements set by the rail manufacturing industry. A large composite sample, with Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) artificial defects, replicating a side-wall section of a new rail carbody, was manufactured and inspected for surface and subsurface defects in this research. The sample, characterized by its large thickness, consists of a monolithic Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymers (CFRP) component (20 mm thickness) and a CFRP-PET foam-CFRP sandwich (40 mm total thickness) component fused together. The main challenge of the inspection procedure was to apply reflection mode thermography and detect defects in the entire thickness of the sample that exhibits both low emissivity and thermal insulating properties, especially at the sandwich sections of the sample. The paper explored thermography procedures that would be able to detect large numbers of defects under one single acquisition and would be applied under an automated inspection process leading to the detection of defects only up to 5 mm in the CFRP sections of the sample while no defects were able to be detected at the back skin of the sample.

Keywords

Step heating thermography / Infrared thermography / Composite rail carbodies / CF-PET-CF sandwich / NDT

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Evangelos Spyrou: Writing - review & editing. Alkiviadis Tromaras: Writing - original draft, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Conceptualization. Vassilios Kappatos: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Project administration.

Data availability

The data that has been used is confidential.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The results incorporated in this paper received funding from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101013296, project title GEARBODIES: Innovative Technologies for Inspecting Carbodies and for Development of Running Gear. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Shift2Rail JU members other than the Union.

The authors would like to acknowledge AIMEN Technology Centre for the manufacturing of the two composite samples that were inspected.

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