Investigation on pseudo-ductility to improve mechanical behavior in glass-cellulose epoxy composites

Abstract

Nowadays composite materials exhibit sudden and catastrophic failure, which is undesirable for several applications. A new class of hybrid laminates was prepared using semi-automated draw down coating method with varying surface coating densities on unidirectional (UD) Glass fiber. Cellulose particles were coated on UD Glass fiber to investigate the effect of pseudo-ductility to improve mechanical behavior. Glass Cellulose epoxy hybrid laminate was fabricated with 5%, 7.5% and 10% of cellulose. Coating with 5% Cellulose produces a coating density of 319.08 g/m2 and exhibits the appreciable pseudo ductile tensile stress-strain behavior with a non-linear variation at second part followed by linear variation at initial region. The response of tensile stress had shown 27% improvement in tensile modulus (330MPa) as compared to neat glass epoxy laminate with 0.04% of pseudo ductile strain. Further, flexural strength and inter-laminar shear strength of each specimen configuration were calculated and found good improvement in flexural strength with cellulose coated samples as compared to Glass-Epoxy laminate.