Foad Karimian Awarded American Society for Nondestructive Testing Graduate Fellowship

Foad Karimian, a Ph.D. Candidate in Reliability Engineering, was recently awarded the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT) Graduate Fellowship. Foad and his advisor, Dr. Mohammad Modarres, submitted a proposal titled "Early prediction of fatigue failure and remaining useful life estimation in CFRP materials based on acoustic emission waveform information entropy."

The ASNT Fellowship Award provides assistance to university or college graduate students in defraying costs of their post-graduate research in NDT/NDE.

The proposed research effort will develop a new fatigue damage assessment method for carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminated composites, which relies on first-principles governing the damage mechanisms in these materials. The proposed approach examines suitability of an entropic index that is based on information entropy of acoustic emission (AE) signal waveforms. Such a measure would be scale- and threshold-independent and removes many limitations with the available threshold-dependent features-based AE signal analysis methods.

The proposed approach is interdisciplinary, involving (I) information theory, (II) experimental mechanics, (III) materials science, (IV) prognostics, (V) health management, (VI) application of modern data analytics to achieve early detection of failure and prognosis of fatigue life in CFRP laminated composites. The new method will significantly improve quantifying the remaining useful life (RUL) estimation of CFRP structures via on-line and offline AE monitoring. The proposed approach can be employed using the current nondestructive testing (NDT) practices for AE data collection with minimal alterations. The AE waveform information entropy method can help to effectively predict fatigue failure at early stages of fatigue life, and support policies to repair, replaces, or retain components based on their RUL.

Congratulations to Foad for this impressive award!

Published April 9, 2020