Advances in Composite Materials: Non-destructive Testing and Multi-Scale Analysis of Structures and Properties

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid development of society and technology, the activities of outer space exploration and population flow and transportation have become more frequent in recent years, which has increased the demand for high-performance and more durable structures. Composite materials possess outstanding properties, including low weight, high strength, fatigue resistance, and tunable designs, compared with traditional engineering materials. High-performance composite materials could effectively improve the load-bearing capacity of structures, reduce self-weight, and facilitate installation, which have been widely used in airplane, automobile, transportation, civil, and other engineering fields. Meanwhile, the increasing applications of composite materials reduce the consumption of non-renewable resources and carbon emissions and contribute to sustainable development, which are consistent with the growing requirements of green and low-carbon circular development systems. During long-term service life, composite applications are subjected to complicated loading and environmental conditions, which result in structural defects, including fiber fracture, matrix crack, and fiber/matrix interfacial debonding, as well as properties degradation of composite materials, and eventually leads to structural failure. Using the integration of disparate techniques, including non-destructive testing (NDT) and multi-scale approaches, this enables the characterization and analysis of composite structures and properties at different length scales, which contributes to the understanding and prediction of durability and service safety of composite applications. 

This Special Issue aims to focus on the characterization and analysis of structures and properties of composite materials at different length scales, using the NDT, multi-scale, together with artificial intelligent approaches, including ultrasonic testing, acoustic emission technique, radiographic testing, computer vision inspection, theoretical calculations, constitutive modeling and simulation, molecular simulations, machine learning, etc.  We aim to particularly focus on the joint efforts of multidisciplinary techniques to characterize the structural defects and properties degradation of the composites, including, but not limited to, the following subjects:

• Defect characterization and detection of composite materials at multiple scales;
• Structural health monitoring of composite structures via machine learning;
• Multi-scale characterization and modeling of composite material degradation;
• Relationship between structural defect and properties degradation;
• Artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted defect detection and properties prediction;
• Long-term durability and service safety of composite materials.

Dr. Lik-Ho Tam
Dr. Guoqiang Cai
Dr. Qiwen Qiu
Dr. Xinchen Zhang
Dr. Pu Xie
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• composite materials
• composite structure
• defect characterization and detection
• structural health monitoring
• properties degradation
• durability
• NDT technique
• multi-scale analysis
• artificial intelligence