Performance Assessment of Composite Structures: An Overview of Activities at the University of Southampton

Understanding the mechanical and physical behaviour of layered orthotropic material is an essential key step in performance assessment of composite structures and sandwich structures. At the University of Southampton, UK, work has been conducted in analytical, numerical and experimental techniques for damage assessment of composite materials and structures. Data-rich experimental mechanics techniques have been developed to assess damage using thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) [1], vibration-based approaches [2-4] and acoustic emission. Alongside this advanced signal processing procedures have been devised to parameterise the data. Work has also concentrated on extracting the stresses and their distributions from complex structures to establish the failure mechanisms and make predictions of the component life [5-8], in particular adhesive joints, e.g. [9].