Abstract
The acoustic emission method was applied during the testing of six full-scale sandwich composite aircraft fuselage panels containing through-the-thickness notches. The panels were subjected to different combinations of quasi-static internal pressure, the corresponding hoop loads, and longitudinal loads. The applicability of conventional acoustic emission signal feature analysis to identify the dominant modes of failure and extraneous emission in large composite structures was investigated. It was concluded that no clear distinction could be made among the different failure mechanisms based on the conventional acoustic emission signal features alone. Further, emission generated by fretting, either among fracture surfaces or of loading fixtures, has acoustic emission signal waveform features that are similar to those of damage-generated emission signals.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
