Correlation of acoustic emission with finite element predicted damages in open-hole tensile laminated composites

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). To this aim, OHT tests were carried out in unidirectional glass/epoxy composite materials. AE accompanied with a wavelet and fuzzy C-means clustering methods were used to distinguish damage mechanisms of the specimen. These damages were consisted of three main mechanisms, including matrix cracking, fiber/matrix debonding and fiber breakage. FE analysis was utilized to validate the AE results. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images were also used to investigate damage mechanisms in the specimen. The comparison of the applied methods shows that the difference in results of FE analysis and wavelet transform methods are less than 15 percent but there is a more difference (around 42 percent) between results of fuzzy C-means and FEM.