A Comprehensive Review on Damage Characterization in Polymer Composite Laminates Using Acoustic Emission Monitoring

This paper provides a consolidated review on the characterization of damage mechanisms in laminated composites using acoustic emission (AE) monitoring technique. The overview of challenges encountered during the elimination of noise from AE signals for identifying the initiation and propagation of damages and location of AE source in polymer matrix composite laminates under various loading conditions is reported. However, the transient AE signals can be discretized into different time domains by using wavelet transformation for discriminating damage mechanisms by peak frequency. AE parameters such as energy, rise time, count, amplitude, and frequency are capable to characterize the damage behaviour in laminated composite materials. Various approaches like multivariable analysis of AE parameters, fast fourier transform (FFT), artificial neural networks (ANN), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) were employed to study the behaviour of composite laminates. Moreover, the mechanical strain energy released from the laminates is correlated with acoustic energy played an essential role in damage initiation and propagation during loading. The application of AE is not limited to identifying failure modes; it also includes determining the type, location, and extent of damage in the structures.