Experimental monitoring of the self-heating properties of thermoplastic composite materials during tensile and cyclic tests

Abstract

The sizing of industrial structures with a given material requires to understand completely its fatigue behaviour. Yet, the full estimation of the fatigue lifetime of a material requires time-consuming and expensive fatigue testing campaigns, and a huge number of samples. An alternative experimental procedure is based on the monitoring of the self-heating properties of the studied material. The aim is to correlate the fatigue limit with a change of the thermal behaviour of the material during the self-heating tests. The main advantage of these tests is that they need only a limited number of mechanical cycles, and require few samples to test. Ultimately, self-heating tests lead to an accelerated estimation of the fatigue behaviour. The purpose of the present paper is to validate this approach for a woven carbon/thermoplastic composite material.