Identification of the local stiffness reduction of a damaged composite plate using the virtual fields method

• Main Authors: Kim, J.-H., Pierron, F., Wisnom, M. R., Kashif, Syed Muhammad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Science Direct 2007
• Subjects: T173.2 Technological change
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/6732/1/SMK_P-1.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/6732/; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compositesa.2007.04.006

In the present study, a damage detection problem is formulated as the identification of the spatial stiffness distribution in a damaged composite plate. Full-field heterogeneous curvature fields obtained from an optical deflectometry technique are processed by using the virtual fields method adapted to retrieve the 2D stiffness distribution map of a damaged carbon-epoxy plate. The method not only picks up the location of the damage but also provides a fairly good estimate of the stiffness reduction in the damaged area. In this paper, the procedure is described, validated on simulated measurements and some initial experimental results are given. � 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.