Improving the impact resistance and damage tolerance of fibre reinforced composites: A review

Abstract

As the use of composite laminates are unceasingly increasing more and more in many applications, the in-depth understanding about the impact response of composite laminates in certain areas like sport, aerospace and automotive has gained more attention of the designers and scientists over the last two decades. The authors have focused to review the impact properties of fibre reinforced composites particularly impact damage tolerance. Impact resistance, damage tolerance, composite failure and methods of assessing damage tolerance are presented. Furthermore, the approaches for improving damage tolerance such as fibre architectures resin system, and hybridisation using either yarn hybridisation or hybrid layers are discussed. In the end, a survey of modelling the impact damage of laminated composites is made by considering the inter-laminar and intra-laminar failures as key point for evaluating the response of laminates under impact loading.

Study on the Low-Velocity Impact Response and Damage Mechanisms of Thermoplastic Composites

“…This invisible damage to the surface can significantly reduce the performance of the material, even reducing the structural load-bearing capacity to half of what it was originally intended to be [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Therefore, low-velocity impact has become a serious threat to the safe use of composite materials [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Improving the impact resistance of composites has become a hotspot for many researchers, and some experts improve the impact resistance of composites by changing the fabric structure and toughening the resin, while others shift the research direction to thermoplastic composites [ 10 ].…”