Smart composites applied to continuous in-service damage monitoring of glass/polymer industrial parts

International audienceThis paper aims at developing a monitoring method making it possible to control the damage of glass/resin materials in-service in order to prevent any catastrophic failure (preventive maintenance). Carbon fibre resistive sensors are introduced directly inside the composite materials during manufacturing. The increase of their electric resistance, caused by the elongation and then the rupture of carbon filaments during loading of the composite structure, is monitored. Finally the electric response of the sensors is modelled in order to develop a real time damage monitoring system. Statistic functions such as Weibull or sigmoid functions are implemented to describe the successive failure phenomenon of the carbon filaments. The concept is validated on a composite pipe subjected to biaxial loading