Non-Destructive Damage Assessment of Five Layers Fiber Glass / Polyester Composite Materials Laminated Plate by Using Lamb Waves Simulation

Abstract

Composite materials are widely used in the engineered assets as aerospace structures, marine and air navigation owing to their high strength/weight ratios. Detection and identification of damage in the composite structures are considered as an important part of monitoring and repairing of structural systems during the service to avoid instantaneous failure. Effective cost and reliability are essential during the process of detecting. The Lamb wave method is an effective and sensitive technique to tiny damage and can be applied for structural health monitoring using low energy sensors; it can provide good information about the condition of the structure during its operation by analyzing the propagation of the wave in the plate. This paper presented the results and conclusions of a theoretical, numerical and experimental study of this method which was used for damage detection in the five layers fiberglass/polyester composite laminated plate, the fiber layer type is plain woven (0^o/90^o). The numerical analysis has been carried out by FEM using ABAQUS software for intact and cracked test specimen with the various boundary conditions and excitation frequencies, the results obtained have been confirmed experimentally by using piezoelectric wafer transducers (PZT) as actuator and sensor for both cases of experiments, it has been noted as a good agreement between experimental and numerical results.