Visual inspection of CFRP laminates based on EIT

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is an emerging method for monitoring damages in carbon fiber reinforced polymer CFRP composites. This paper presents a method of detecting the shape and position for the damages of anisotropic CFRP laminates based on EIT with embedded electrodes. According to the boundary values of voltage change collected from the electrodes, the conductivity distribution map of the material is reconstructed to assess the damage condition. In order to improve the quality of reconstructed images, a new modified residual norm steepest descent (MRNSD) algorithm is applied to reconstruct the conductivity distribution. Moreover, the EIT test system is built for experimental verification. The experimental results verify both the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.