System for automatic detection of defects in composite structures

This paper presents the concept of a system for the automatic detection of defects in composite structures using a time domain spectroscopy (TDS) scanner. The operation of the presented system can be divided into several stages, i.e. measurement with a high-speed terahertz scanner based on electronically controlled optical sampling (ECOPS), filtering of the obtained terahertz signals, peak to peak (P2P) in the slice parameterisation, generation and selection of the most representative signal features indicating the presence of a defect and classification of whether a given signal disturbance should be considered a defect. All elements beyond the measurement stage are realised in post-processing.