L. Huo
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6 records found
1
Improvements in current design approaches require further studies of the damage interaction effects of composite materials subjected to repeated out-of-plane concentrated loads. To that end, a combined simulation and experimental investigation on composite laminate under repeated indentations is reported. The repeated indentations consist of seven identical peak-force indentations that are separately applied to the centre of the laminate. The results show that delaminations grow in all seven indentations, which can be interpreted as a continuous degradation of the effective delamination growth threshold with each subsequent indentation. More specifically, the second indentation effective delamination growth threshold is 62.4 MPa, which is about 19 % lower compared to the first one (77.2 MPa). Subsequently, the delamination growth threshold degraded approximately linearly with indentation. This effective delamination growth threshold reduction can be associated with the occurrence and evolution of the crack-rich zone preceding the delamination front.
Principles of strength of materials and fracture mechanics can be adopted to apply specific delamination initiation and propagation prediction methods to composite laminates. It is known that fracture mechanics methods have advantages in addressing delamination growth problems. On the other hand, it is also shown in the literature that strength of materials methods are generally best suited for quasi-static delamination growth. This implies that the growth of low-velocity impact or quasi-static indentation delaminations in composite laminates could also be predicted with an appropriate strength of materials approach. It is therefore necessary to comprehensively assess the ability of strength of material approaches to predict delamination of a composite laminate under out-of-plane concentrated loading. Since a stable stress field is the basic condition for the application of the strength of materials methods, the out-of-plane quasi-static indentation loading condition is first considered in this thesis. ...
Principles of strength of materials and fracture mechanics can be adopted to apply specific delamination initiation and propagation prediction methods to composite laminates. It is known that fracture mechanics methods have advantages in addressing delamination growth problems. On the other hand, it is also shown in the literature that strength of materials methods are generally best suited for quasi-static delamination growth. This implies that the growth of low-velocity impact or quasi-static indentation delaminations in composite laminates could also be predicted with an appropriate strength of materials approach. It is therefore necessary to comprehensively assess the ability of strength of material approaches to predict delamination of a composite laminate under out-of-plane concentrated loading. Since a stable stress field is the basic condition for the application of the strength of materials methods, the out-of-plane quasi-static indentation loading condition is first considered in this thesis.
Full impact damage tolerance assessment requires the ability to properly mimic the repeated impact response and damage behaviour of composite materials using quasi-static approximations. To this aim, this paper reports an experimental investigation evaluating two quasi-static methods for mimicking repeated impact response and damage behaviour of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) composite laminates. In this study, an 8.45-J single impact was repeated 225 times and mimicked with 225 times 6.51-J quasi-static (energy equivalent) indentations and with 225 quasi-static (force equivalent) indentations following the recorded impact peak force variation. Results show that the loading rate and the inertial effect are the two major factors affecting the responses of the composite laminates under out-of-plane concentrated loading. Both the energy- and force-equivalent quasi-static indentations failed to reproduce the impact responses greatly associated with high loading rate and inertial effect. The force-equivalent quasi-static indentations were performed in a semi-automatic way and induced damage states more similar to those of the repeated impacts than those of the energy-equivalent quasi-static indentations, whereas the latter can be better automated and has better reproducibility compared to that of the repeated impact responses, as it is less dependent on high loading rate and inertial effect.