Investigation of indentation damage resistance on normal and inclined plane of glass/epoxy composite laminates using acoustic emission monitoring

This work relates to the investigation of indentation induced damage resistance in glass fiber reinforced polymer composite laminates under normal and inclined planes. Uni-directional [0] and cross-ply [0/90] glass fiber reinforced polymer composite specimens were subjected to 0° and 20° indentation loading with acoustic emission monitoring. The specimens were loaded at the centre using a hemispherical steel indenter with 12.7 mm diameter. Mechanical responses such as force–displacement behavior, absorbed energy and resulting damage area were used for the quantification of the indentation damage. Acoustic responses such as normalized cumulative counts, energy, duration and peak frequency were considered for monitoring damage progression during 0° and 20° indentation loading. The residual compressive strength of the glass fiber reinforced polymer specimens following indentation was measured by testing them under in-plane loading, once again with acoustic emission monitoring. The correlation between mechanical and acoustic strain energy was used for the evaluation of the damage severity of the laminates. The result revealed indentation damage resistance in cross-ply laminates as 65.08% and 68.01% higher than uni-directional laminates for 0°, whereas for 20°, there was a reduction in the damage resistance in cross-ply laminates to 43.27% and 57.39%. These were higher than uni-directional laminates under the displacements of 2 mm and 3 mm, respectively. The conclusion from these results was that transverse shear load at 20° inclination of laminate leads to reduction in residual compressive strength. Moreover, uni-directional glass/epoxy laminates have better residual compressive strength than cross-ply laminates for both 2 mm and 3 mm indentation displacements.