Damage methodology approach on a composite panel based on a combination of Fringe Projection and 2D Digital Image Correlation

•The severity of damage in composite components is analyzed based on their mode shape.•FP and 2D-DIC has been employed at high speed for measuring 3D displacements.•Adaptive shape descriptors were used to compare reference and damaged specimens mode shapes.•Results show that some damages have no importance in the integrity of the specimens.•Frequency analysis is not trustworthy in the determination of severity of the damage. The recent improvement in accessibility to high speed digital cameras has enabled three dimensional (3D) vibration measurements employing full-field optical techniques. Moreover, there is a need to develop a cost-effective and non-destructive testing method to quantify the severity of damages arising from impacts and thus, enhance the service life. This effect is more interesting in composite structures since possible internal damage has low external manifestation. Those possible damages have been previously studied experimentally by using vibration testing. Namely, those analyses were focused on variations in the modal frequencies or, more recently, mode shapes variations employing punctual accelerometers or vibrometers. In this paper it is presented an alternative method to investigate the severity of damage on a composite structure and how the damage affects to its integrity through the analysis of the full field modal behaviour. In this case, instead of punctual measurements, displacement maps are analysed by employing a combination of FP+2D-DIC during vibration experiments in an industrial component. In addition, to analyse possible mode shape changes, differences between damaged and undamaged specimens are studied by employing a recent methodology based on Adaptive Image Decomposition (AGMD) procedure. It will be demonstrated that AGMD Image decomposition procedure, which decompose the displacement field into shape descriptors, is capable to detect and quantify the differences between mode shapes. As an application example, the proposed approach has been evaluated on two large industrial components (car bonnets) made of short-fibre reinforced composite. Specifically, the evolution of normalized AGMD shape descriptors has been evaluated for three different components with different damage levels. Results demonstrate the potential of the presented approach making it possible to measure the severity of a structural damage by evaluating the mode shape based in the analysis of its shape descriptors.