Modeling of Ultrasonic Waves in Composite Parts via Implementation of Spectral Element Method

Abstract Fiber-reinforced composites are relevant in many engineering disciplines. Composite structures are routinely inspected for defects. Ultrasonic inspection has been explored as a candidate for composite health monitoring. However, a hindrance to adopting ultrasonic inspection of composites is a partial lack of open-source tools that model complex domains and anisotropic wave propagation. The spectral element method has been demonstrated to model structures with complex geometry. This method has high accuracy, good convergence characteristics, and low computational costs compared to the accuracy achieved. SPECFEM3D has been developed in the seismology community to achieve this. It was designed as an open-source framework for modeling wave propagation in the earth’s interior. However, SPECFEM3D is robust and may be applied at many scales. Little work demonstrates SPECFEM3D’s capabilities in modeling wave propagation in composites. This work benchmarks SPECFEM3D as a framework for modeling macro-scale wave propagation within composites in simple and complex geometries. After simulations with composite structures of different geometries, a comparison is made with experimentally acquired data. The results are promising and indicate a future direction for research in experimentally validated three-dimensional ultrasonic wavefield modeling.