Numerical Simulation Techniques for Damage Response Analysis of Composite Structures

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of composite structures plays an important role in nondestructive evaluation of safety-critical engineering applications. Elastic wave propagation based SHM techniques have proven their potential in effective assessment of structural discontinuities and damages. Numerical simulations play a significant role in development of robust SHM strategies for such composite structures. These simulations are experimentally validated for selected baseline cases and then applied to solve a panoptic range of plausible study cases, such as—variable operating conditions, increasing structural complexities, damage size and damage shapes. Thus, the numerical simulations can significantly help in reducing rigorous laboratory experimentations, saving time and cost. This chapter is mainly focused on the guided wave propagation and acoustic emission-based damage response analysis in fiber (graphite/glass/natural) reinforced composite structures used in the automotive, marine, wind-energy and aerospace industries. Based on the problem-solving efficiency and popularity, the spectral element and finite element method based numerical simulation technics are explicitly selected to be discussed here.