Synergetic Use of Thermal and Acoustic Emission in Studying Tensile Behaviour of Fibre Reinforced Composites

The possibility to combine the use of acoustic emission and thermal emission as real-time monitoring techniques on carbon-epoxy composites is the subject of this paper. Tensile tests are therefore performed, using a cross-head speed not too high so to enable a reliable detection of acoustic emission signals, but suitable also for the needs of the thermal emission technique,. The latter technique, which requires a quasi-adiabatic loading to be applied on the material, is here employed with a quasi-thermographic concept, with the twofold objective of measuring the thermoelastic limit and investigating the local heat exchange produced by the loading event. The idea is therefore to use thermal emission as a predictive inspection tool and, as a consequence, to correlate in a synergetic way its data with acoustic emission outputs.