Fiberglass epoxy from acoustic emission signal parameters

Acoustic emission signal parameters were used to isolate the failure mechanisms in a 0 degree unidirectional, fiberglass epoxy tensile test specimen. Since several failure mechanisms were known to be present, the lack of any distinctly identifiable bands in the original amplitude distribution indicated that there was considerable overlap between the acoustic emission signals from the various failure mechanisms. In order to separate the amplitude bands associated with each mechanism, it was necessary to sort on the duration of the acoustic emission signal. Two additional plots, counts versus amplitude and hits versus counts, were used to verify that the amplitude distributions were comprised of a single predominant mechanism. A total of seven failure mechanisms were isolated from the original data set, all but two having a shape similar to that of a normal distribution.