Detection of fibre fracture and ply fragmentation in thin-ply UD carbon/glass hybrid laminates using acoustic emission

This paper investigates the link between acoustic emission (AE) events and the corresponding damage modes in thin-ply UD carbon/glass hybrid laminates under tensile loading. A novel configuration was investigated which has not previously been studied by AE, where the laminates were fabricated by embedding thin carbon plies between standard thickness translucent glass plies to produce progressive fragmentation of the carbon layer and delamination of the carbon/glass interface. A criterion based on amplitude and energy of the AE event values was established to identify the fragmentation failure mode. Since the glass layer was translucent, it was possible to quantitatively correlate the observed fragmentation during the tests and the AE events with high amplitude and energy values. This new method can be used as a simple and advanced tool to identify fibre fracture as well as estimate the number and sequence of damage events that are not visible e.g. in hybrid laminates with thick or non-transparent layers as well as when the damage is too small to be visually detected.