Study of damage evolution in composite materials based on the Thermoelastic Phase Analysis (TPA) method

Abstract Standards and conventional procedures used for analysing fatigue damage in composite materials involve high experimental campaign costs due to time-consuming tests. This aspect becomes relevant for large structures where the cost of experimental setup tends to rise according to structure dimensions. In this regard, in recent years, efforts to produce fatigue characterisation of materials have made use of several experimental techniques, i.e. thermographic techniques. Most of these, however, refer to Standard specimens and laboratory equipment and set-up. Through the use of Thermography, in this work a new procedure has been developed which is capable of monitoring damage in GFRP composite material. The analysis of thermal signal in the frequency domain allows for the isolation of indexes which are related to the thermoelastic and dissipative heat sources. In particular, the phase of thermoelastic signal, associated with intrinsic dissipation processes occurring in the material, has been used to localize and assess the damaged areas in a quantitative manner. Moreover, the thermoelastic phase analysis leads to an evaluation of the endurance limit of composites. In fact, by comparing the results with those provided by the standard test methods, the potential has been shown of the proposed procedure firstly as a non-destructive technique for continuous monitoring of damage in composite structures undergoing fatigue loadings, and secondly, as a fatigue limit index.