To obtain mechanical tensile properties of materials it is customary to equip the specimen directly with a device to measure strain and Young’s modulus correctly and only within the measuring length defined by the standards. Whereas a variety of tools such as extensometers, strain gauges and optical systems are available for specimens on coupon level, no market-ready tools to measure strains of single fibres during single fibre tensile tests are available. Although there is a standard for single fibre testing, the procedures described there are only capable of measuring strains of the whole testing setup rather than the strain of the fibre. Without a direct strain measurement on the specimen, the compliance of the test rig itself influences the determination of the Young’s modulus.
This work aims to fill this gap by establishing an enhanced method to measure strains directly on the tested fibre and thus provide accurate values for Young’s modulus. It is demonstrated that by applying and then optically tracking fluorescing polymeric beads on single glass fibres, Young’s modulus is determined directly and with high repeatability, without a need to measure at different measuring lengths or compensating for the system compliance. Employing this method to glass fibres, a Young’s modulus of approximately 82.5 GPa was determined, which is in the range of values obtained by applying a conventional procedure. This enhanced measuring technology achieves high accuracy and repeatability while reducing scatter of the data. It was demonstrated that the fluorescing beads do not affect the fibre properties.
In this paper, the bending stiffness-to-weight-ratio of novel hybrid sandwich structures is investigated. The build-up of the sandwich panels consisted of face sheets made from carbon fibre reinforced polymer, aluminium foam cores and an interface of foamed polyurethane. The sandwich panels were produced in a single step, infiltrating the face sheet fibres and connecting the face sheets to the core simultaneously. By means of mechanical characterization, specimens with several variations of face sheet architecture and thickness, core structure and interface properties were examined. Quasi-static four-point bending and flatwise compression tests of the sandwich composites were conducted, as well as tensile tests of the face sheets. The results of the tensile and compressive tests were integrated in analytical models, describing the sandwich stiffness depending on the load case and the face sheet volume fraction. The effective Young’s modulus of the composite, measured in the four-point bending test, correlates well to the modelled effective bending modulus calculated from the single components face sheet and core. The model underestimates the effective density of the bending specimens. It could be shown that this underestimation results from the polyurethane foam connecting the face sheets to the core, as the mass of this polyurethane is not included in the model.
This work focuses on failure mode maps of sandwich panels exposed to bending load, which were produced using a polyurethane spraying process. This process allows for an automated production of sandwich panels omitting a separate bonding step of the face sheets to the core. The investigated sandwich panels consisted of carbon fiber reinforced face sheets in various configurations, and four different core structures of aluminum foam or Nomex honeycomb. After production, measurements of the pores inside the core foam structures, the fiber package thickness inside the face sheets, and the density homogeneity of the core structure were made using X-ray computed tomography. The failure mode maps were based on the individual mechanical properties of the face sheets and the core, determined by mechanical testing. The critical forces determining the failure modes were partially modified to fit the application on foam core structures and face sheets with a porous matrix. The verification of the failure modes was performed with four-point bending tests. Since all tested configurations of sandwich specimens were produced using the same process route, the applied models for the creation of the failure mode maps could be verified for numerous parameter combinations. Except for two parameters with inconstant properties, the failure modes determined by the failure mode maps matched the observed failure modes determined by the bending tests.
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