Acousto-ultrasonic damage evaluation of carbon fibre composites using pencil lead break sources

Pierre Duchene (1, 2) , Salim Chaki (1, 2) , Patricia Krawczak (1, 2)

1 TPCIM - Département Technologie des Polymères et Composites & Ingénierie Mécanique
2 IMT Lille Douai - Ecole nationale supérieure Mines-Télécom Lille Douai

Acoustic emission (AE) is a passive non-destructive testing (NDT) technique, which can detect evolving damage in materials or structures submitted to mechanical loading. Therefore, free stress structures cannot be monitored by AE. Moreover, there are numerous applications where mechanical loading stimulation is not desirable as it may induce damage in the material as in the case of composite pressure containers that must be submitted to hydraulic pressure test to use AE. This paper proposes a novel active method based on acousto-ultrasonic (AU) analysis for damage evaluation without mechanical loading. It uses pencil lead break sources as stimulus and data fusion processing to improve damage assessment. After a detailed description of the AU procedure, a case of study is presented on a carbon fibre/epoxy matrix composite material submitted to unidirectional stepwise fatigue loading. Damage assessment is obtained for each fatigue loading step as damage location mapping.

Mots clés: Polymer composites; Mechanical damage; Non-destructive testing; Acousto-ultrasonic; Guided waves; Acoustic emission AE; Composite materials and structures

Domaines: Science des matériaux [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]; Mécanique [physics]; Mécanique des matériaux [physics.class-ph]; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Pierre Duchene, Salim Chaki, Patricia Krawczak. Acousto-ultrasonic damage evaluation of carbon fibre composites using pencil lead break sources. 18th European Conference on Composites Materials (ECCM18), Jun 2018, Athens, Greece. ⟨hal-02006152⟩