Inferring the degradation of pultruded composites from dynamic nonlinear resonance measurement

The Chemical resistance of pultruded polyester composites to various chemical immersion solutions is investigated as a function of the exposure time, and the observations from static tests are compared with the results from nonlinear dynamic vibration experiments. The mechanical properties were measured according to ASTM standards, both in flexural and tensile tests. Barcol hardness and sorption measurements provide complemntary information. In addition, a novel nondestructive (NDE) method, called Single Mode Nonlinear Resonance Acoustic Spectroscopy (SIMONRAS), was applied to measure the linear and nonlinear dynamical properties of the samples as a funtion of exposure time. This new NDE method focuses on the strain amplitude dependence of the resonance frequency while driving a sample at relatively low excitation levels. The obtained relative frequency shift is a measure of the internal microstructural properties of the material. The correlation between this nonlinearity parameter and the mechanical properties is extremely good, which implies that the SIMONRAS technique can be applied to predict the chemo-mechanical degradation of composites in a nondestructive manner.