Abstract
The aim of this work was to investigate the effect of loading angle variation on the pseudo-ductility of quasi-isotropic (QI) hybrid composite laminates. Previously, hybrids of thin-ply carbon fibres and standard glass fibres were found to have an excellent pseudo-ductile behaviour both in unidirectional (UD) and QI configurations when subjected to axial tension in the fibres’ orientations. In this work, the QI laminates, with 60° intervals, have been subjected to a quasi-static tensile load at various off-axis orientations – i.e. 5o, 10o and 20o. The QI hybrid composites were made by sandwiching a QI T300-carbon laminate between the two halves of a QI S-glass laminate. The results showed a pseudo-ductile behaviour with a linear elastic part and a desirable plateau for all the loading directions, however the pseudo-ductile strain decreases when increasing the off-axis angle. Comparing the 20o off-axis with the other cases, there was more active matrix cracking damage before fragmentation in the 20o off-axis plies and it failed earlier than the other samples. Acoustic emission (AE) results confirmed this, with more matrix cracking related AE signals in the 20o off-axis case compared to the other configurations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 112444 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Composite Structures |
| Early online date | 7 May 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2020 |
Keywords
- pseudo-ductility
- hybrid composites
- off-axis
- fragmentation
- acoustic emission