One of the barriers for high volume, rapid composite manufacture is the threat of damage. This is particularly an issue for pipes that are made in long lengths that cannot be easily joined if a damaged zone is found part-way along the length. This project aims to develop suitable equipment and methodology to continuously assess the quality of the composite pipe as it is manufactured using recently developed rapid scan, phased array ultrasonics. An ‘effect of defects’ study will be carried out that will allow the NDT information to be evaluated into a go/no-go decision. The project will also develop a tool and a methodology of repairing the composite during the manufacturing stage of the pipe such that the whole length does not have to be scrapped.

The NDT2DT project aims to develop software tools to bring together two state of the art technologies for composite material structures. In the recent years, significant advances have been made in rapid, phased array ultrasonic and X-ray tomography for 3D volumetric mapping of internal damage of composites. In parallel, the modelling techniques to assess damage tolerance (DT) are rapidly being implemented in finite element analysis (FEA) codes. This project is to join these two technologies together so that the non-destructive testing (NDT) inspection method will rapidly give a qualitative decision to the operator of the composite material asset being inspected. The proposed techniques can apply to quality control (manufacturing), maintenance or in-service inspections. Currently, the inspection methods used may detect damage but any assessment relies on the engineering judgement of the asset owner. The main objective of this project is to develop software tools that will enable the transfer of NDT information obtained on composite material structures directly into the FEA code for subsequent failure analysis.