Abstract
The electrical sensitivity of glass fiber/multiwall carbon nanotube/vinyl ester hierarchical composites containing a tailored electrically-percolated network to self-sense accumulation of structural damage when subjected to cyclic tensile loading-unloading is investigated. The hierarchical composites were designed to contain two architectures differentiated by the location of the multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), viz. MWCNTs deposited on the fibers and MWCNTs dispersed within the matrix. The changes in electrical resistance of the hierarchical composites are associated to their structural damage and correlated to acoustic emissions. The results show that such tailored hierarchical composites are able to self-sense damage onset and accumulation upon tensile loading-unloading cycles by means of their electrical response, and that the electrical response depends on the MWCNT location.
Highlights
With the increased use of fiber-reinforced polymer composites (FRPCs) for structural applications, such as aerospace, marine, wind turbine, and automotive industries, the interest in developing structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques that ensure a safe structural performance of the composite has increased [1]
This method allows the entire structure to be monitored [4,5,6]. This technique circumvents the issue of sensitivity to damage accumulation of acoustic emission (AE) by using the residual electrical resistance after unloading the structure
The higher electrical conductivity of the composite with architecture f results from the contribution of electrically-conductive pathways created along the fibers upon multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) deposition and due to additional lateral contacts among adjacent fibers of the laminate
Summary
With the increased use of fiber-reinforced polymer composites (FRPCs) for structural applications, such as aerospace, marine, wind turbine, and automotive industries, the interest in developing structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques that ensure a safe structural performance of the composite has increased [1]. A promising SHM approach that can overcome these issues consists in making the composite electroconductive in such a way that, for an applied stress/strain, the composite experiences a change in its electrical conductivity An advantage of this SHM technique is that the composite itself is capable of tracking its own damage progression (i.e., embedment of external sensors is not required) and does not suffer from problems associated with stress concentrations (as for common embedded sensors). This method allows the entire structure to be monitored [4,5,6]. Electrical resistance measurements have been widely used to detect damage
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