Thin-ply carbon fiber laminates have exhibited superior mechanical properties and damage resistance when compared to standard thickness plies, and enable greater flexibility in laminate design. However, the increased ply count in thin-ply laminates also increases the number of plyply interfaces, thereby increasing the number of relatively weak and delamination-prone interlaminar regions. In this study, we report the first experimental realization of aligned carbon nanotube interlaminar reinforcement of thin-ply unidirectional prepreg-based carbon fiber laminates, in a hierarchical architecture termed 'nanostitching'. We synthesize a baseline effective standard thickness laminate using multiple thin plies of the same orientation to create a ply block, and we find an ~15% improvement in the interlaminar shear strength via short beam shear strength testing for thin-ply nanostitched samples when compared to the baseline. This demonstrates a synergetic strength effect of nanostitching (~5% increase) and thin-ply lamination (~10% increase). Synchrotron-based computed tomography of post mortem SBS
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