Characterization of Polymer Matrix Composite Ply Thickness

Abstract

The ply thickness variation in the layup of polymer matrix composites has not been previously characterized. In this article, we used a normal distribution to characterize the ply thickness of a carbon fiber reinforced polymer. We used thresholding of optical microscopy images to identify the interlaminar boundaries within the specimen. The distance between interlaminar boundaries created the sample set to estimate the parameters of a normal distribution. We examined the resulting distribution using quantile-to-quantile plots, which indicated that ply thickness is well characterized by a normal distribution.