Quantification of damage mechanisms in holed composite laminates by acoustic emission and finite element methods

The laminated composites have many advantages such as high specific strength and specific stiffness. Despite of these advantages, they are prone to different damage mechanisms. This paper focuses on quantification of damage mechanisms in standard Open-Hole Tensile (OHT) laminated composites using Acoustic Emission (AE) and Finite Element Method (FEM). These damages include three main mechanisms, matrix cracking, fiber/ matrix debonding and fiber breakage. To this aim, OHT tests were carried out. The specimens fabricated from two types of glass/epoxy composite materials with [0]5S lay-up and [90]5S lay-up. AE accompanied with wavelet-based approach was then used to detect and quantify damage mechanisms of the specimens. FE analysis based on Hashin criteria was then utilized to simulate the damage mechanisms in the specimens and to validate the AE-wavelet based results. The comparison of applied methods show that the results of the AE-wavelet based approach are in very good agreement with the FEM results. Finally, it was concluded that the AE method has a good applicability to determine the damage mechanisms in laminated composite structures and to predict the remaining life-time of the structure.