Monitoring progression of mode II delamination during fatigue loading through acoustic emission in laminated glass fiber composite

Abstract Acoustic emission (AE) was used to monitor damage development in a glass fiber/epoxy composite during monotonic and cyclic Mode II loadings of DCB specimens. AE parameters such as event count rates and accumulative event counts together with the distribution of events by time and location in the DCB specimen were used as proper indicators of the damage growth at various stages during testing. AE proved to be a powerful technique to predict in real time the interlaminar failure stress (delamination in Mode II) in both the static and the dynamic tests. An S ‐ N curve constructed entirely on the AE signatures recorded during fatigue testing exhibits three distinct stages enabling delineation of period of damage initiation, the period of damage growth, and finally the occurrence of delamination. A generalized expression based on the nonlinear cumulative damage model was developed to correlate AE activity with the damage development in the composite during cyclic loading. The fatigue data to date agree well with this method of prediction of the fatigue life.