National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA
NASA Projects
Post Process NDE of Welds and Marcelling in Thermoplastic Composites
Duration: 2022-2024
Role: PI
Research Objectives: A small part in this multidisciplinary and multi-million dollar Hi-CAM project was to investigate if the Guided Wave Ultrasonic (GWU) NDE could be matured to the level where it could be used for NDE of thermoplastic welds and marcelled composite structures reliably. Target would be reach to TRL/MRL level 4 by the end of the project duration. Initial test plan and test results are promising.
In-situ GWU NDE of Induction Welds in Thermoplastic Composites
Duration: 2022-2024
Role: Co-PI
Research Objective: This is also a small part of a multidisciplinary and multi-million dollar Hi-CAM project. Objective is to investigate if the Guided Wave Ultrasonic (GWU) NDE could be used and implemented for in-situ NDE of induction welding (between Skin and Stringer) while the parts are getting welds. Objective is to investigate, research and develop ultrasonic NDE data analysis tool for indicating defects like abnormal bonding and delamination and matured to the level where it could be used for NDE of thermoplastic welds in real time. While doing so it is proposed to develop and utilize Ultrasonic signal calibration for Crystallinity, Porosity and Voids type defects, how they affect the ultrasonic signals, which are unknown or non existent for thermoplastic composites.
Nondestructive Evaluation SOA for High Rate Manufacturing
Duration: 2021-2022
Role: PI
Research Objective: Objective of this short duration project was to evaluate all NDE technologies that are applicable for High Rate Manufacturing of Composites in the future. First the basic NDE technologies that are used as Baseline with their respective key performance parameters (KPP) were found. To leap the speed to match the Hi-rate demand, challenges and gaps were identified. With the respective gap analyses, few possible future NDE technologies were identified for both post process and in-situ NDE.
Damage Detection using Two Stage Compressive Sensing
Duration: 2020-2023
Role: PI
Research Objective: This SBIR Phase I & II project was subcontracted by Advent Innovations and the objective was to create a Compressive Sensing algorithm that can compress the ultrasonic A-scan, B-scan, C-scan datasets into much smaller memory footprint but can be reconstructed when needed with full understanding as if data are not lost. Both ultrasonic data and images were compressed and reconstructed successfully. Suitable compression ratios much below Nyquist range were found, below which loss of important damage feature could be lost. A joint patent with Advent Innovations was filed in 2023.
Resonant Ultrasonic Bessel Beam Yielding (RUBY) for Deep inspection inside Composite
Duration: 2020-2021
Role: PI
Research Objective: This SBIR Phase I project was subcontracted by Advent Innovation Limited Company and the research objective was to investigate if Bessel Beam ultrasonic could be used for deep NDE of multilayered structure with attenuative layers. Through Ultrasonic modeling an axicone was predictively designed that generates Bessel beam and can effectively interrogate the composite TPS interface without removing the aerogels.
Advanced Composite Program: Ultrasonic Assessment of Bond Quality in Composite
Duration: 2016-2019
Role: Co-PI
Project Objective: Find defects in composite bond lines and quantify the bond strength. How different peel plies could affect the bound quality was one of the question to answer. A novel Bond Quality Index (BQI) was created from ultrasonic NDE data through training a model. BQI would be effective in quantifying the health of a composite bond to certify for order repair.
Multi-scale Computational Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of Space Composites
Duration: 2015-2018
Role: PI
Research Objectives:
The objective of this project is to address the challenges and bridge the gaps in Computational NDE. The central objective was to develop a predictive tool that will enable quantitative understanding of ultrasonic energy interaction with degraded and/or damaged aerospace composites. This project resulted in to three modules called, Wave-DISP, Wave-FILM, and INDICATE. Wave-DISP and INDICATE are developed in MATLAB. But due to the heavy nature of computation, Wave-FILM that simulate wave propagation in composite using DPSM method is developed in GPU enable highly parallel C++.