Determination of Fiber Content in 3-D Printed Composite Parts Using Image Analysis

Harsh Srivastava, Hammond Pearce, Gary Mac, Nikhil Gupta

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Fiber-reinforced composite parts used in drones, automobiles, and sports equipment are now being manufactured by additive manufacturing (AM), where the material parameters such as fiber direction can be changed within a layer or from one layer to the other. Nondestructive evaluation methods are required to assess the quality of such customized printed parts. In this work, a microcomputed tomography (μ CT) dataset is analyzed to determine the fiber content in a 3-D printed composite material part using a digital binary image processing method. The existing literature on binary image analysis methods to measure the fiber volume fraction is limited to continuous fiber reinforced composites. Discontinuous fiber reinforced 3-D printing filaments are popular in manufacturing parts with increased strength. The methods developed in this work expands the binary image process to scans that show fibers embedded lengthwise in different directions in the 3-D printed layers. An optimized thresholding method is trained on the filament sample and then applied to 3-D printed samples. The results show fiber volume fraction measurements with standard deviations below 0.15%. The results in this work will be useful for product quality validation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)115-118
Number of pages4
JournalIEEE Embedded Systems Letters
Volume14
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 2022

Keywords

  • Additive manufacturing (AM)
  • composite material
  • cyber-physical system
  • nondestructive evaluation (NDE)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • General Computer Science

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