Health monitoring of carbon/carbon, woven reinforced composites. Damage assessment by using advanced signal processing techniques. Part I: Acoustic emission monitoring and damage mechanisms evolution

The present work, first of two parts, deals with three types of woven carbon/carbon (C/C) composites having differentiations during the manufacturing procedure, which influences their fibre/matrix interface. All material types were tested under tensile loading in a load–unload–reload configuration, with online acoustic emission monitoring. Unsupervised pattern recognition algorithms were utilized to classify the acoustic emission (AE) data recorded during the tests. The resulted clusters, concluded by the analysis of AE hits, are associated with the damage mechanisms of the material, activated at the different load levels, and significant remarks were extracted regarding the damage evolution and its differentiation according to the different fibre/matrix interfaces. Emphasis is given on the impact of the different interface types upon the total mechanical behavior and damage accumulation at the test coupons. A qualitative evaluation of the interfaces using non-destructive testing data is also attempted. This first part intends to propose methodologies and procedures to analyze data from online acoustic emission monitoring in order to extract useful information regarding the damage evolution within C/C materials.