Characterization of Composite Materials from Temporal Thermal Response

Abstract

<p>Fiber reinforced composite materials are increasingly used in applications that require high strength to weight ratio and resistance to high temperatures. Recent works specifically concerning thermal transfer have led to a better understanding of the relationship between constituents and the relative thermal properties. One focus is to obtain the effective thermal properties of an equivalent homogeneous medium that gives the same averaged thermal response as the composite [1, 2, 3]. Another one is the interfacial thermal barrier effect in heat conduction in heterogeneous media [4, 5, 6]. In the present work, an experimental setup used for the nondestructive characterization of multilayered flat plates [7] was modified to image the thermal response of fiber reinforced composite materials. The technique consists in rastering a laser beam, the heat source, at the surface of the specimens. At each point, the temperature is measured as a function of time. A multi-image, composed of the temperature time history at each pixel, is obtained. A model predicting the temperature response of such composite materials is presented and compared to the experimental data.</p>