MECHANICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF INTRA-PLY HYBRID COMPOSITE LAMINATES USING ACOUSTIC EMISSION

A recent year, in the replacement of heavy weight components into a lightweight components and parts. The main advantage of this type of material increment is the low-cost fabrication and development in the biodegradability. This paper deals with the failure behaviour of homogenous and hybrid composite laminates reinforced by carbon-glass intra-ply fabrics using A.E. technique. Fiber Reinforced composite materials have been widely used in aircraft, spacecraft, automotive and electronic industries. There are several methods used to detect damage mechanism of composite materials and acoustic emission (AE) technique is an important method of non-destructive testing. The main advantage of AE is that it is a dynamic method capable of continuously testing the structures. The characterization of the damage mechanism in composite materials under AE monitoring is still a major concern to differentiate the failure. To overcome this issue of identifying the failure modes, successfully correlating the AE signal and mechanical properties of the different composite materials subjected to tensile testing. AE data recorded during the tensile testing of a single layer specimen are used to identify failure modes such as matrix cracking and fiber failure, while delamination is characterized using a single-layer specimen. The specimens are prepared and tensile test is carried out using 100 kN Tinious Olsen universal testing machine with AE monitoring. Parametric studies using AE peak frequency is very powerful tool to describe the damage mechanism of the different stacking sequence of GFRP (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer) and CFRP (Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer) composite laminates. The individual failure mode of Glass/epoxy, Carbon/epoxy, Hybrid /epoxy laminates was investigated.