Impact Damage Investigation on Glass Fiber-Reinforced Plate Laminates at Room and Lower Temperatures through Ultrasound Testing and Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry

In this work, the evaluation of damage area due to low-velocity impact tests at different impact energy values and different temperatures on glass fiber-reinforced plate laminates was investigated by two nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques, electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) and ultrasound testing (UT). Composites are characterized by several interacting failure modes such as matrix breakage, fiber failure and delaminations, which can be simultaneously induced by low-velocity impacts and can be different depending on the temperature. It can be complicated to detect by visual inspections of the structures for such phenomena. This paper aims to investigate the dependence of the damaged area with respect to temperature variation on glass fiber composite laminates. GF composite laminates were impacted with three energy levels (5, 10, 20 J) and at different temperatures (room temperature, − 25, − 50 °C) by a drop weight impact machine. The results show that at decreasing temperature, a decrease in the damage extension was observed, which is more evident at increasing impact energy. Moreover, as expected, the results confirm UT and ESPI techniques are able to identify the barely visible low-velocity impact damage. However, some limitations for detection were found in ESPI. Nonetheless, the ESPI technique can be considered as one of the useful NDE methods if the calibration and the post-processing methods are improved. © 2019, ASM International.