Terahertz nondestructive layer thickness measurement and delamination characterization of GFRP laminates

Three-dimensional nondestructive location of defects, such as delaminations, in glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) laminates remains a challenge. Terahertz techniques have shown promise, but their success relies on advanced signal-processing techniques applied to the raw data. The current work presents an advance in the quantitative three-dimensional nondestructive location of delaminations in GFRP laminates. Namely, terahertz time-of-flight tomography, together with adaptive sparse deconvolution based on a two-step iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm, as well as the Canny edge-detection operator, are employed in nondestructive measurement of layer thicknesses and to extract the edges of delaminations in GFRP laminates. Compared with the commonly used frequency wavelet-domain deconvolution method or previous implementations of sparse deconvolution, the adaptive sparse deconvolution approach provides a clearer and rapid stratigraphic reconstruction of GFRP laminates while yielding accurate thickness information for each resin layer and low sensitivity to noise. In addition, the proposed edge-detection algorithm presents better performance in estimating the transverse size of delaminations, compared to the common −6 dB drop approach. Finally, our experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed signal and image processing approaches for three-dimensional localization of delamination defects in GFRP laminates and the quantitative characterization of layer thickness.