An open-source biaxial tensile tester with automated pre-tensioning for mechanical studies of canvas paintings.

The mechanical aspects of canvas painting conservation and the study of the effects of conservation treatments benefit greatly from quantifying the mechanical characteristics of the materials. However, this is seldom possible as only few labs have the necessary equipment. This paper presents the development of a biaxial tester to be used for samples of canvas paintings which exhibit orthotropic behavior under biaxial loads.

Spectral characteristics of gold nanoparticle doped optical fibre under axial strain.

Nanoparticle (NP) doping of optical fibres can be used to increase the intensity of the backscattered light used for distributed strain sensing and has shown the advantages of high precision strain detection and multiplex sensing experimentally. However, the backscatter spectral characteristics of NP-doped optical fibres have not been described even though they are quite different from the spectra from fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) or commercial single mode fibres. In this paper, gold NPs, used as the contrast agent in the optical fibre to increase the intensity of the backscattered light, were investigated from the aspect of their spectra.

Assessment of the Measurement Performance of the Multimodal Fibre Optic Shape Sensing Configuration for a Morphing Wing Section.

In this paper, with the final aim of shape sensing for a morphing aircraft wing section, a developed multimodal shape sensing system is analysed. We utilise the method of interrogating a morphing wing section based on the principles of both hybrid interferometry and Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) spectral sensing described in our previous work. The focus of this work is to assess the measurement performance and analyse the errors in the shape sensing system.

Modeling and Imaging of Ultrasonic Array Inspection of Side Drilled Holes in Layered Anisotropic Media.

There has been an increase in the use of ultrasonic arrays for the detection of defects in composite structures used in the aerospace industry. The response of a defect embedded in such a medium is influenced by the inherent anisotropy of the bounding medium and the layering of the bounding medium and hence poses challenges for the interpretation of the full matrix capture (FMC) results. Modeling techniques can be used to understand and simulate the effect of the structure and the defect on the received signals.

Optimization of light scattering enhancement by gold nanoparticles in fused silica optical fiber.

A conventional distributed fiber optic sensing system offers close to linear sensitivity along the fiber length. However gold nanoparticles (NP) have been shown to be able to enhance the contrast ratio to improve the quality of signal detection. The challenge in improving the contrast of reflected signals is to optimise the nanoparticle doping concentration over the densed sensing length to make best use of the distributed fiber sensing hardware.

A Gaussian Beam Based Recursive Stiffness Matrix Model to Simulate Ultrasonic Array Signals from Multi-Layered Media.

Ultrasonic testing using arrays is becoming widely used to test composite structures in the Aerospace industry. In recent years, the Full Matrix Capture (FMC) technique has been implemented to extract the signals for post-processing to form an image. The inherent anisotropy and the layering of the structure pose challenges for the interpretation of this FMC data.

Simulation of Ultrasonic Beam Propagation From Phased Arrays in Anisotropic Media Using Linearly Phased Multi-Gaussian Beams.

Phased array ultrasonic testing is widely used to test structures for flaws due to its ability to produce steered and focused beams. The inherent anisotropic nature of some materials, however, leads to skewing and distortion of the phased array beam and consequently measurement errors. To overcome this, a quantitative model of phased array beam propagation in such materials is required, so as to accurately model the skew and the distortion.

3D shape shearography technique for surface strain measurement of free-form objects.

Shearography is a non-destructive testing technique that provides full-field surface strain characterization. Previous inspection of flat objects or simple geometric shapes has been reported. However, real-life objects especially in aerospace, transport, or cultural heritage are not flat, but their inspection with shearography is of interest for both hidden defect detection and material characterization.

Phase discontinuity predictions using a machine-learning trained kernel.

Phase unwrapping is one of the key steps of interferogram analysis, and its accuracy relies primarily on the correct identification of phase discontinuities. This can be especially challenging for inherently noisy phase fields, such as those produced through shearography and other speckle-based interferometry techniques. We showed in a recent work how a relatively small 10×10 pixel kernel was trained, through machine learning methods, for predicting the locations of phase discontinuities within noisy wrapped phase maps.

Optical coherence elastography for measuring the deformation within glass fiber composite.

Optical coherence elastography (OCE) has been applied to the study of microscopic deformation in biological tissue under compressive stress for more than a decade. In this paper, OCE has been extended for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, to deformation measurement in a glass fiber composite in the field of nondestructive testing. A customized optical coherence tomography system, combined with a mechanical loading setup, was developed to provide pairs of prestressed and stressed structural images.

Real-time extended dynamic range imaging in shearography.

Extended dynamic range (EDR) imaging is a postprocessing technique commonly associated with photography. Multiple images of a scene are recorded by the camera using different shutter settings and are merged into a single higher dynamic range image. Speckle interferometry and holography techniques require a well-modulated intensity signal to extract the phase information, and of these techniques shearography is most sensitive to different object surface reflectivities as it uses self-referencing from a sheared image.

Kinematic and deformation parameter measurement by spatiotemporal analysis of an interferogram sequence.

In recent years, optical interferometry has been applied to the whole-field, noncontact measurement of vibrating or continuously deforming objects. In many cases, a high resolution measurement of kinematic (displacement, velocity, and acceleration, etc.) and deformation parameters (strain, curvature, and twist, etc.