Residual tensile strength monitoring of drilled composite materials by acoustic emission

Drilling results in damage such as delamination and matrix cracking around the hole and might ultimately causes degradation in the residual tensile strength of the drilled components. The damage induced during the drilling of composites can be detrimental to the mechanical behavior of the composite products. In this work, the effects of machining parameters (feed rate and cutting speed) and drill point angle on thrust force, the adjusted delamination factor and residual tensile strength are investigated. The Taguchi technique for the design of experiments was employed to analyze the thrust force, adjusted delamination factor and residual tensile strength of woven glass/resin epoxy. The results show that feed rate and drill point angle are the most important parameters. During tensile testing of drilled laminates, acoustic emission (AE) events were recorded. By feature extraction of AE time domain parameters, the suitable parameter for detecting the characteristics of thrust force and tensile force were determined. The AE mean power (MP) and cumulative count correlated well with thrust force and tensile force, respectively.

► Drilling and tensile testing is conducted on GFRPs based on the Taguchi method.
► Feed and drill angle have significant effects on the residual tensile strength.
► The critical thrust force is determined by extrapolation.
► Acoustic emission is used to monitor the drilling and tensile tests.
► Mean power and cumulative count monitor thrust and tensile forces, respectively.