Combination of digital image correlation and acoustic emission for damage assessment of beam carbon/epoxy sub-components

Thin-walled composite structures are widely used in many applications due to their high specific strength and stiffness as well as due to their tailored fibre directionality. Understanding the damage process in composite components is of paramount importance in order to optimise their design and to improve numerical models. Non-destructive testing, namely Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and Acoustic Emission (AE) is used in this study during static and fatigue loading of carbon fibre/epoxy hollow beams. The combination of these techniques for composite component testing is evaluated and the potential of each method is exploited.