Assessment of Fracture Behaviour under Impact Loading with Simultaneous Recording of Acoustic Emission

Abstract The objective of this paper is the assessment of the toughness of glass fiber-reinforced polypropylene and polybutene-1 by means of fracture mechanics concepts to describe the resistance against unstable crack initiation for these materials. In addition, the acoustic emissions during the instrumented Charpy impact test were recorded, which allows the characterization of the damage kinetics. For this purpose, the recorded transient signals of the acoustic sensor were analyzed with the wavelet transform. Thus, it was possible to describe the onset of the damage in the time domain, as well as the load F s and the corresponding deflection f s . In dependence on the bonding conditions of the materials, the damage onset was detected for polypropylene before and for polybutene-1 at the transition from elastic to elastic-plastic behaviour.