ABSTRACT
From the component manufacturer's point of view the issues of quality control and characterization arise in several different contexts. While the broader concept of quality assurance is a system of activities to ensure consistent quality of a product or service, quality control refers to the actual act of ensuring that a product or service is of consistent quality. The quality is usually assessed through quantification of a property of the product or the service, which is then compared to a standard. Characterization is here taken to imply quantification of physical, mechanical, or thermal properties, either for quality control or design purposes. It is important to realize that experimentally determined properties of composites vary widely, mainly due to the complexity and inherent variability of a composite. Quite often it is not economically feasible to destructively test selected components for quality control purposes and in many applications the customer specifies that quality control procedures must include testing of every single component delivered.
