Acoustic emission performance for damage monitoring of impacted FRP composite laminates

The purpose of paper is to emphasize the AE capabilities on detection and characterization of the impact damage of FRP composite laminates. These materials, in particular FRP, have anisotropic and non homogeneous property that confer it a hardy predictable mechanism of damage such as initiation, growth and propagation of failure, delamination, breaking of matrix and fibers, debonding, pull-out and more else, as a consequence of impact. Impact in composite materials, even if it is performed with low velocity can cause considerable and also invisible damage, so, knowing the behavior of this material after impact is useful especially to the aeronautical industry that uses a great deal of composite material. AE is a suitable NDT method to detect in real time the progressive damage that occurs, giving information about nature and location of the dam. By means of AE we have characterized the damage of composite laminates and evaluated the cumulative damage of FRP. In the spirit of the impact field we have also analyzed many aspect of the damage like the magnitude of the damage, the residual life of the composite.