A Numerical Tool for Assessing Random Vibration-Based Fatigue Damage Diagnosability in Thermoplastic Coupons

A numerical tool is developed to simulate the random vibration-response-only-based fatigue delamination diagnosability in thermoplastic coupons. That is the ability to both detect damage and identify its current severity, aiming to establish a virtual framework for optimizing diagnosability methods. The numerical tool employs the FE method. It comprises two modules: a fatigue delamination module and a random vibration module. The first module implements a fatigue crack growth model based on the cohesive zone modeling method to predict delamination accumulation, while the second module uses an experimentally verified FE model of the delaminated coupon to predict its random vibration response. Delamination accumulation is evident in the ‘predicted’ FE-based power spectral densities. The model’s capability to diagnose delamination is demonstrated using seven different damage metrics based on simulated random vibration responses, enabling damage detection and severity assessment (increasing trend guides to distinguishing each fatigue state from its counterparts). Comparisons with their experimentally obtained counterparts are also used in the assessment. The procedure clearly suggests that the proposed numerical tool may be reliably used for virtually assessing the efficacy of random vibration-based fatigue damage diagnosability for any given structure and also to aid the user in selecting the method’s parameters for virtual diagnosability optimization.