Deeper Material Testing Insights with Thermography and Acoustic Emission

News25

For a number of fiber composite developments and applications, detailed knowledge of failure under mechanical stress is of great importance.  To describe individual damaging events during the quasi static tensile test in both, thermal and acoustic way, the advantages of active and passive infrared thermography (IRT) and acoustic emission (AE) are now being combined for the first time at Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe (IVW).

A local damaging event leads to a mechanical wave propagation, which can be detected by using AE sensors. At the same time, the recorded signal is used as reference time for the evaluation of the IRT data. By using algorithms originally developed for active thermography, it was possible to visualize not only near-surface damages, but also events occurring in deeper layers and to distinguish between matrix cracks and fiber breaks.

Conversely, the result was correlated with the characteristics of the acoustic events and a relation was proved. Thus, this work lays an important foundation for the integration of further methods within the framework of material characterization and serves to better understand material behavior.

Contact:
Vitalij Popow
Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe GmbH
Erwin-Schrödinger-Str. 58
67663 Kaiserslautern
Telefon: +49 631 2017 243
E-Mail: vitalij.popow@ivw.uni-kl.de

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