The Boeing Company

Paul Shelley

Greg Werner

Paul Griffin Vahey

Wes Quigley

A method of determining a physical property of a composite material includes providing a series of composite materials surfacing films, which are subjected to increasing thermal experience to create a set of thermal effect standards, collecting near-IR spectra on those standards, performing data pre-processing and then multivariate calibration on the spectra of the composite materials surfacing films, and using that calibration to predict the thermal effect for samples in question.

Thermal effect measurement with near-infrared spectroscopy

A method for fabricating thermal effect standards includes providing an oven, placing at least one temperature sensor at measurement location in the oven, operating the oven, monitoring a temperature output of the at least one temperature sensor, providing at least one composite material specimen, placing the at least one composite material specimen at the measurement location in the oven and heat treating the at least one composite material specimen as at least one thermal effect standard by operating the oven according to the temperature output of the at least one temperature sensor. A method of determining a physical property of a composite material is also disclosed.

Method for fabricating thermal effect standards

A method of non-destructively determining the physical property of a material surface, the method including irradiating a surface with infrared energy over a spectrum of wavelengths; detecting said infrared energy reflected from said surface over said spectrum of wavelengths; performing multivariate calibration of said reflected infrared energy at a plurality of selected wavelengths including said spectrum of wavelengths; using results of said multivariate calibration to predict one or more physical properties of said model material; and, determining said one or more physical properties of said surface. Details are included for the case where uni-directional fiber CFRP materials are to be calibrated and predicted because special care must be taken for that material to insure the incident light from the spectrometer is at the proper orientation for calibration and for prediction of samples in question.

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Lakewood, WA, United States of America

Paul Shelley