Residual strains and their relation to the fatigue damage evolution in composite materials

Abstract eng:
The fatigue performance of unidirectional glass fibre reinforced epoxy is found to be highly dependent on at which curing temperature the composite is manufactured. Performing the curing at 110C instead of at 40C is found to reduce the lifetime dramatically with a factor of 10. Even though, the volumetric shrinkage of the epoxy at the two curing cycles is identical, the resulting residual strain in an embedded optical fibre measured using fibre Bragg Grating is found to be increased with a factor of 3. Together with, 3D x-ray tomography of partly fatigued test specimens there is an indication of a link between the measured increased residual strains with the governing fatigue damage mechanism.

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