In-situ fatigue damage assessment of carbon-fibre reinforced polymer structures using advanced experimental techniques

This study focused on the in-situ fatigue damage assessment of open-hole carbon/epoxy coupons using Acoustic Emission (AE) and Digital Image Correlation (DIC) techniques. Constant amplitude fatigue tests were performed and the main objective was to investigate the damage process, the degradation process of the fatigue modules and to identify features, derived from the experimental data, that can be used as sensitive-to-damage indexes. To this end, the two experimental techniques were reviewed as potential online monitoring tools for the fatigue damage assessment.