Evaluation of Accumulated Damage in a Polymer Composite Material Based on Statistical Analysis of Acoustic Emission Diagnostics Results

ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate the kinetics of damage accumulation in specimens made of polymer composite material (PCM) using the acoustic emission (AE) method, a key step in developing a structural health monitoring (SHM) system for aircraft. To address this task, a new method is proposed that evaluates the damage parameter of PCMs based on statistical processing of AE parameters. The performance of the proposed technique is demonstrated under quasi‐static loading of PCM specimens until failure. For damage evaluation, the selected AE criteria are the 0.9 quantile of the front‐energy distribution and the 0.9 quantile of the average count frequency. The technique involves calculating the weight fraction of streaming AE parameters within segments, which correspond to matrix cracking, local fiber fracture, and intensive damage accumulation. On the basis of the weight fraction of the streaming parameters within the above‐mentioned segments, an empirical model is developed to quantify the damage state of the composite specimen. For the studied composite specimens, the estimation error of the damage parameter obtained with this model does not exceed γ = 3.6%.