Study of Drilling of Composites through Ultra Sonic Testing

Composite materials are most widely used in aerospace, automobile and marine industries owing to their properties such as their strength to weight ratio is very high and also they possess high stiffness. The machining of composite material is different from conventional machining of metals due to anisotropic and non-homogeneous nature. Drilling is one of the machining operations required to produce holes in the materials. Damages caused during drilling of composite materials are one of the prime factors to look into. The most widely found drilling related defect in composite materials is delamination. This work deals with conducting experiments on the GFRP material by using Ultrasonic testing and evaluation of delamination defect. A and C-scans are used for the study of delamination. It was observed that the amplitude of the Ultrasonic wave reflected the drilling related delamination.