Characterization of fatigue damage in unidirectional GFRP composites through acoustic emission signal analysis

Fatigue damage progression in composite materials is governed by different failure mechanisms, each of which contributes to the damage to a different extent. To assess the cumulative damage undergone by the material and to estimate the residual life, it is necessary to discriminate and characterize the failure mechanisms. This necessitates an on-line technique which can be used to monitor and measure the damage progression as it occurs. Acoustic emission (AE), an on-line monitoring tool, is ideally suited for this purpose. To understand fatigue damage in terms of different failure mechanisms using this technique, it becomes necessary to identify and establish their AE characteristics. This paper discusses the experimental investigations carried out on unidirectional glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) composite specimens in which the acquired AE data was analysed utilizing pattern recognition (PR) techniques. The results obtained from the experiments show that three different failure mechanisms which primarily contribute to the damage at any given stage can be discriminated and characterized. Further, an attempt is made to estimate the cumulative damage to predict residual life.