Automatic Detection of Fiber Orientation on CF/PPS Composite Materials with 5-harness Satin Weave

The physical proprieties of composite materials are highly influenced by the fiber orientation. This characteristic becomes critical when we bring into question composite laminates materials with unidirectional or bidirectional fiber reinforcement, which exhibit an orthotropic behavior. In this work, we propose a simple, fast and very stable method for automatic detection of fiber orientation on carbon fiber (CF) polyphenylene sulfide (PPS) composite materials with 5-harness satin weave (5-H satin). Our approach is based on the analysis of a material picture, using image processing and computational geometry techniques such as edge detection, flood fill and minimum-area enclosing rectangle. The results obtained are very accurate with the same good stability for any picture/fiber orientations. Even the method was built around a specific composite material, i.e. CF/PPS 5-H satin CETEX from the TenCate Company, with some small parameters tuning, it can be successfully applied to other materials, some different examples being shown in this paper.