Composite materials characterization based on a computed tomography scan optimization approach

This work deals with the application of a DoE based optimization approach in order to estimate XCT parameters configuration quantitatively for three different kinds of composite materials in function of scan contrast-to-noise ratio measurement. These are carbon fiber, glass fiber and flax fiber reinforced epoxy composite materials. An analysis of actual densities of these scanned components, which resulted to be 1.53, 1.96 and 1.29 g/cm3 respectively, was useful to understand how much their variations, together with the percentage of inner detected anomalies, were linked to the optimal XCT parameters selected from DoE. These turned out to involve an X-ray source voltage of 120 kV for carbon and glass fiber ones, while 115 k V for flax fiber one.