Experimental observation of stress waves propagating in laminated composites

The theoretical research on stress waves propagating in laminated composites has been reported by many authors. However, there has been little work on experimental studies of stress waves in those materials. This paper presents an experimental investigation on stress waves propagating parallel to the layers of a laminated composite. A sandwich laminated composite consisting of two aluminum facings and an epoxy core is used as a specimen. The stress wave in the specimen is observed by use of high-speed holographic interferometry with a pulsed laser. In order to obtain the relative fringe orders, the interference fringe pattern in the reconstructed image is treated as an image-processing system with a personal computer. For the calculation of the in-plane displacement, an approximate relative-fringe-order method is used. The in-plane displacements obtained at some sampling points on the surface are smoothed by using a spline function. Distributions of the in-plane displacement and the shear stress are then obtained quantitatively over the whole analyzed field.