Novel Standoff Detection of Material Damage Precursors for Structural Health Monitoring and Prediction

Because of the overwhelming migration to composites, particularly exotic thermoset materials from the bismaleimide (BMI) family, the PNTS team is focusing its work on this topic on composite structures. The team's high level approach will be to demonstrate an innovative and practical design using dielectric spectroscopy at millimeter wave through terahertz frequencies that will provide composite material integrity assessment to address and identify material damage precursors, including the little understood reversion of composite polymers which ultimately leads to premature failures. The comprehensive analysis regime will also provide 3-D images of artifacts such as intralayer delamination/disbond and other structural defects. The final deliverable for this Phase I program will include the demonstration of the nondestructive evaluation method applied on a structural composite coupon subjected to fatigue loads. The comprehensive schema developed by the PNTS team will have the capability to predict remaining useful life (RUL) of the coupon within 10% error on or before 50% of the total useful life of the coupon has been expended. As"ground truth"for the schema, PNTS will employ Trilion Quality Systems'ARAMIS product.