Artificial neural network a tool for predicting failure strength of composite tensile coupons using acoustic emission technique

A series of 18 tensile coupons were monitored with an acoustic emission (AE) system, while loading them up to failure. AE signals emitted due to different failure modes in tensile coupons were recorded. Amplitude, duration, energy, counts, etc., are the effective parameters to classify the different failure modes in composites, viz., matrix crazing, fiber cut, and delamination, with several subcategories such as matrix splitting, fiber/matrix debonding, fiber pullout, etc. Back propagation neural network was generated to predict the failure load of tensile specimens. Three different networks were developed with the amplitude distribution data of AE collected up to 30%, 40%, and 50% of the failure loads, respectively. Amplitude frequencies of 12 specimens in the training set and the corresponding failure loads were used to train the network. Only amplitude frequencies of six remaining specimens were given as input to get the output failure load from the trained network. The results of three independent networks were compared, and we found that the network trained with more data was having better prediction performance.