Compressive failure of fibre composites

A novel image analysis procedure for measuring fibre misalignment in unidirectional fibre composites

“…The compressive strength in commercial unidirectional carbon fibre reinforced polymers is often less than 60% of the tensile strength [1]. This often makes the compressive strength the limiting design factor in large composites structures that are loaded in bending or compression.…”

“…Today it is widely accepted that the dominant failure mode in most commercial unidirectional polymer-matrix fibre composites is localized plastic microbuckling [1][2]. In the early models by Argon [2] and later Budiansky [3] the shear modulus, shear yield strain and fibre misalignment were identified as the main factors governing the compressive strength.…”

Effects of imperfections on localized bulging in inflated membrane tubes

“…Examples of this type include necking of a polymeric strip under stretching [6,7], Lüders band formation in steel strips [8,9], localized bulging in inflated membrane tubes [10][11][12], kink band formation in fibre-reinforced composites [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] and layered structures [20,21], and stress-induced phase transformations [22][23][24]. For each of these problems, the actual load deformation diagram typically contains four distinctive sections: a section of uniform deformation that is terminated when the load reaches a maximum, a snap-back section, growth of the localized deformation as the load decreases, and propagation of the localized deformation at a constant value of the load.…”

Folding of woven composite structures

“…According to Ref. [15], the dominant mechanism of compressive failure in polymermatrix composites is plastic microbuckling. Hence, the compressive strength is controlled by fibre misalignment together with plastic shear deformation of the matrix.…”