Towards understanding residual strength and damage evolution in damaged composite laminates

Fibre reinforced polymer composites have found increasing use in aircraft structures. This means that fleet managers need damage assessment tools for such materials, in order to decide on appropriate sustainment strategies. Developing such tools is hindered by the difficulty of generalising from lab tests to predict the behaviour of full-scale...

Experimental investigation of planar delamination behaviour of composite laminates under Out-Of-Plane loading

Delamination growth is a key damage mode threatening the structural integrity of fibre reinforced polymer composite structures. To guide design and damage management of composite structures, research efforts have been made to understand delamination behaviours and establish standardized evaluation methods based mainly on one-dimensional...

Compression after impact fatigue damage growth in CFRP – what does no-growth really mean?

Impacts on carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP) can produce a complex internal damage comprising multiple delaminations, which is hard to detect from visual inspection. This situation is known as barely visible impact damage (BVID). Considering that every airplane faces several impacts during its operational life, and that the majority of...

A cycle-by-cycle fatigue damage analysis of biaxial composite structures utilizing acoustic emission

In the present work, a fatigue damage analysis of biaxial Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) specimens loaded at two different stress levels and a fatigue ratio, R=0.1, was performed. A cycle-by-cycle approach was used, utilizing results from Acoustic Emission (AE) measurements. The aim was to investigate the influence of the applied...

Characterising resistance to fatigue crack growth in adhesive bonds by measuring release of strain energy

Measurement of the energy dissipation during fatigue crack growth is used as a technique to gain more insight into the physics of the crack growth process. It is shown that the amount of energy dissipation required per unit of crack growth is determined by Gmax, whereas the total amount of energy available for crack growth in a single cycle is...

A PhD student’s experience with open research data

A PhD student’s experience with open research data