Preliminary Design of a Low-Resolution Thermography Camera System for Subsurface Defect Detection of a Thin Composite Plate; A Case Study for Composite Electric Bus Structure

The use of electric vehicle especially electric bus in on the rise. Unfortunately, it still has a downside which is not having enough distance compared to the conventional bus which uses diesel as its energy source. One of the reasons that affect the distance the electric bus can travel is the weight of the bus. The lighter the bus, the longer it can travel. Because of that, a new way of building the chassis and bus body structure that uses the composite material to replace not just heavy but also rusty prone metallic material has been developed. Now that the weight has improved, it creates another problem where the current method of inspecting the quality of the product during manufacturing is not just error-prone, but also take a longer time than it is allocated. The available tool in the market is expensive and a lot of investment is needed to make it work with a large structure such as the bus that a small company could not afford. Due to that, this project is going to address the need by designing and developing a thermal imaging tool for composite damage detection. The design process is done by using a model-based systems engineering method to identify the needs of the user and develop the functional requirement it needs based on that. Then, the structure of the tool is allocated to the functional requirement and eventually, the hardware needed for it to become a complete product is identified. Once the hardware has been identified, it now can be integrated and several conceptual housing designs are developed where the final selection of the design is selected by using the Pugh evaluation matrix method. The integrated hardware is then put to test to ensure the tool works as intended. Based on the experiment conducted, the tool can detect a sub-surface damaged-induced specimen up to 2 mm depth. More than that, a longer time is needed which is not productive. In conclusion, although the developed tool meets all its objectives, there is still room for improvement to make it work efficiently in the field.