Micro-Cantilever Testing Of Cementitious Materials Under Various Loading Conditions

Nanoindentation is usually used to investigate local elastic properties and hardness of materials. In this paper, the nanoindenter served as a loading tool to perform micro scale bending tests and measure the global response of micro-scale specimens. For testing, cement paste cantilever beams with a square cross-section of 300 μm × 300 μm were...

Evaluating delamination growth in composites under dynamic loading using infrared thermography

In this paper, a method has been developed to use thermography for the quantitative analysis of a delamination area under dynamic loading. To demonstrate this method, a coupon was developed with double shear configuration and an initial delamination consisting of a PTFE insert. The coupon was tested under fatigue loading and an infrared (IR)...

Experimental/numerical characterization of hygrothermal ageing in glass/epoxy composites

In this work, a combined experimental/numerical approach is used to investigate the effect of water ingression in glass/epoxy composite specimens. Interlaminar shear (ILS) specimens were immersed at 50◦C for multiple durations and tested. Re-dried specimens were also tested. Significant strength degradation of up to 50% was found for wet...

Experimental/numerical study of anisotropic water diusion in glass/epoxy composites

In this work a glass/epoxy composite commonly used in wind turbine blades is exposed to a humid environment at an elevated temperature. To research the anisotropic di_usion behaviour observed in unidirectional composite specimens, experimental results of slices cut along the three directional planes of the laminate immersed in demineralised...

Micromechanics-based validation of a mesomodel for matrix nonlinearity

The performance of a mesomechanical constitutive law for composites is assessed through comparison with micromechanical model results. In this paper, results are presented for non-monotonic strain histories obtained from mesomechanical simulation of a shear dominated delamination test.