Towards understanding residual strength and damage evolution in damaged composite laminates

Fibre reinforced polymer composites have found increasing use in aircraft structures. This means that fleet managers need damage assessment tools for such materials, in order to decide on appropriate sustainment strategies. Developing such tools is hindered by the difficulty of generalising from lab tests to predict the behaviour of full-scale...

Compression after impact fatigue damage growth in CFRP – what does no-growth really mean?

Impacts on carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP) can produce a complex internal damage comprising multiple delaminations, which is hard to detect from visual inspection. This situation is known as barely visible impact damage (BVID). Considering that every airplane faces several impacts during its operational life, and that the majority of...

Evaluating and predicting fatigue behavior in adhesively bonded joints

The fatigue behavior of an adhesively bonded joint is of key importance to its long-term structural integrity. However, the complex stress distribution inside a bonded joint does not make it easy to evaluate the fatigue behavior. This chapter discusses the various approaches that have been developed for predicting the fatigue behavior of...

Fracture and Failure of Adhesives

This article presents an overview of methods for analyzing the facture and failure of adhesives. Special attention is given to stress analysis in adhesive bonds, as the difficulty of performing an accurate stress analysis is a major limitation of many failure analysis methods. The article also covers the effect of manufacturing and...

Investigating apparent plateau phases in fatigue after impact damage growth in CFRP with ultrasound scan and acoustic emissions

In previous literature, a plateau phase in fatigue growth of impact delamination projected area in CFRP was found. Explaining this plateau phase still represents a knowledge gap. In the present work, echo-pulse and through thickness transmission ultrasonic scan inspections were combined with acoustic emission monitoring to explain this...

Using acoustic emission to understand fatigue crack growth within a single load cycle

Current methods for prediction of fatigue crack growth are based on empirical correlations which do not take the crack growth behaviour within a single cycle into account. To improve these prediction methods, more understanding of the physical mechanisms of crack growth is required. In this research the acoustic emission technique was used to...

Characterisation of Fatigue Crack Growth in Adhesive Bonds