The RD3 Electronic Digital Tap Hammer has arrived!
It is still pretty much a tap test, but the striker is electronically actuated and the "listening" is recorded, digitally, so you do can get a much less subjective read-out of of the result....
As for use of carbon, or even fiberglass, in a pressure vessel.....that is kind of old technology, too....pressure tanks, and the like are regularly filament wound. It is a pretty well matched application to the material properties.
I understand that carbon fiber tape laying is a slightly different and bit more technologically advanced methodology than plain old filament winding....but the manufacturing princples are pretty much the same.
If you were to step backward in time and look again....Say you had begun making aircraft out of fiber reinforced plastic materials....and the aluminum salesman showed up at your airplane factory, today, and he was peddling a material with the chrystalizaton, cyclic fatigue problems and plastic deformation characteristics of aluminum....would you be buying?
I didn't think so...
