Artificial intelligence for non-destructive testing of CFRP prepreg materials

This paper presents a concept of the quality assurance for CFRP prepreg materials and focusses on the classification of thermographic images using convolution neural networks (CNNs). The method for non-destructive testing of CFRP prepreg materials combines a laser-triangulation sensor and an infrared camera to monitor both, the geometry and the impregnation of the prepreg material. The aim is to ensure a high material quality excluding any defective material in an early stage of the process chain of the production of CFRP components. As a result, the reliability of Automated-Fiber-Placement processes utilizing this previously tested material increases. Therefore, an artificial intelligence is set up to classify the thermal images of the CFRP material. Two different architectures of CNN are trained and validated with data sets consisting of thermal images of several prepreg materials and different material defects, such as geometric deviations and varying fiber-matrix-ratios caused by an incorrect impregnation. The CNNs are able to differentiate prepreg materials and to detect and classify certain material-independent defects for known and trained prepreg materials.