Classification of damage modes in composites by using principal component analysis

Classification of damage modes in composites by using principal component analysis

This paper focuses on the use of principal component analysis (PCA) to classify different fracture signals from background noises. PCA is a method used to simplify high order data sets to lower dimension for a simpler analysis. Tensile tests carried out on glass fiber reinforced epoxy composites and acoustic emissions recorded from these tests. The aim of this study is to classify the acoustic emission (AE) signal using PCA. To reduce the multi linearity among AE parameters (such as peak amplitude, ring-down count, etc) and extract the significant AE parameters, correlation analysis utilized. The experimental results show the successful separation of experimental fracture mode signals from the background noise.