Fracture mechanisms of plain woven fabric laminated composites

Abstract

The fracture mechanisms of plain woven fabric laminated composites were studied by load-displacement curves, AE behavior, and macro- and micro-observations in tensile tests. The results obtained are as follows: (1) The failure processes which are accumulative can be divided into three stages on the load-displacement curves of the composites. The stage I is elastic. In the stage II, the debonding in weft takes place. The stage III mainly corresponds to the matrix cracking and the separation between wefts and warps. They depend on the weave structure strongly but are related little with the ply number of laminates. (2) The boundaries of the stages I to II and II to III have some relations to the point where the AE event count rate can be detected first and the point where the rate increases rapidly, and thus the dominant failure mode can be well traced from the patterns of the AE event count rate and the AE energy curve. © 1989, The Society of Materials Science, Japan. All rights reserved.