Adhesive Defect Monitoring of Glass Fiber Epoxy Plate Using an Impedance-Based Non-Destructive Testing Method for Multiple Structures

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Jun 19;17(6):1439. doi: 10.3390/s17061439.

Abstract

The emergence of composite materials has revolutionized the approach to building engineering structures. With the number of applications for composites increasing every day, maintaining structural integrity is of utmost importance. For composites, adhesive bonding is usually the preferred choice over the mechanical fastening method, and monitoring for delamination is an essential factor in the field of composite materials. In this study, a non-destructive method known as the electromechanical impedance method is used with an approach of monitoring multiple areas by specifying certain frequency ranges to correspond to a certain test specimen. Experiments are conducted using various numbers of stacks created by attaching glass fiber epoxy composite plates onto one another, and two different debonding damage types are introduced to evaluate the performance of the multiple monitoring electromechanical impedance method.

Keywords: adhesive bonding; electromechanical impedance; glass fiber composite; non-destructive testing; piezoelectric transducer.