Experimental setup for the bending fatigue of fibre-reinforced composite materials

摘要

The life estimation of composite structures and components, subjected to fatigue loadings, is essential to determine the moment of repair or replacement. Therefore the degradation behaviour and damage development within composite materials should be very well understood. This paper focuses in the first part on an experimental setup which is developed for bending fatigue experiments. The materials used are plain woven glass-epoxy specimens in two configurations : [0°/90°]8 and [+-45°] 8. Experiments show that these two specimen types have a quite different damage behaviour and that the stiffness degradation follows a different path. Next a numerical model is presented which allows one to describe the degradation behaviour of the composite specimen during its fatigue life. This model can be easily implemented in a numerical software package and is useful to check the validity of a proposed fatigue degradation law for composite materials.