Composite materials are supplanting conventional metals in aerospace, automotive, civil and marine industries in recent times. This is mainly due to their high strength and light weight characteristics. But with all the advantages they have, they are prone to delamination or matrix cracking. These types of damage are often invisible and if undetected, could lead to appalling failures of structures. Although there are systems to detect such damage, the criticality assessment and prognosis of the damage is often more difficult to achieve. The research study conducted here primarily deals with the structural health monitoring of composite materials by analysing vibration signatures acquired from a laser vibrometer. The primary aim of the project is to develop a vibration based structural health monitoring (SHM) method for detecting flaws such as delamination within the composite beams. Secondly, the project emphasises on the method's ability to recognise the locatio n and severity of the damage within the structure. The system proposed relies on the examination of the displacement mode shapes acquired from the composite beams using the laser vibrometer and later processing them to curvature mode shapes for damage identification and characterization. Other identification techniques such as a C-scan has been applied to validate the location and size of the defects with the structures tested. The output from these plots enabled the successful identification of both the location and extent of damage within the structure with an accuracy of 96.5%. In addition to this, this project also introduces a method to experimentally compute the critical stress intensity factor, KIC for the composite beam. Based on this, a technique for extending the defect has been proposed and validated using concepts of fatigue and fracture mechanics. A composite specimen with a 40 mm wide delamination embedded within was loaded under fatigue conditions and extension of the defect by 4mm on either s ide of the specimen's loading axis was achieved satisfactorily. The experimental procedure to extend the defect using fatigue was validated using the SLV system. Displacement and Curvature mode shapes were acquired post-fatigue crack extension. Upon analysing and comparing the displacement and curvature mode shapes before and after crack extension, the extended delamination was identified satisfactorily.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/257114 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Oruganti, Krishna, krishnaov@yahoo.com |
| Publisher | RMIT University. Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.rmit.edu.au/help/disclaimer, Copyright Krishna Oruganti |
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