Compression after impact fatigue damage growth in CFRP – what does no-growth really mean?

Impacts on carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP) can produce a complex internal damage comprising multiple delaminations, which is hard to detect from visual inspection. This situation is known as barely visible impact damage (BVID). Considering that every airplane faces several impacts during its operational life, and that the majority of exposed surfaces in new generation aircraft is made of CFRP, there is a high chance that some aircraft will be flying with unnoticed impact damage. For this reason, BVID damage tolerance must be taken into account in design. The FAA and EASA dictate a no-growth design philosophy for BVID. Although multiple delaminations are present, BVID fatigue growth is usually assessed by measuring only the projected delaminated area with ultrasound inspections. This is done to simplify the damage description and because of the limitations in ultrasound inspection methodologies. In the present work, we show two cases of delamination propagation that are neglected following this procedure. Our experimental monitoring of delamination propagation with different ultrasound techniques shows a) growth inside the impact cone and b) faster growth of shorter delamination. The conclusion is that the projected area description is insufficient, since a no-growth in the projected area does not necessarily correspond to a no-growth in the actual damage.