ON THE INFLUENCE OF FIBRE REINFORCEMENT AND HYBRIDISATION INTO THE CRASHWORTHINESS OF COMPOSITE TUBES

摘要

Growth demand has been shown in the use of composite materials for crashworthiness applications, because they can be designed to provide crashworthiness parameters, which are superior to those of metals when compared on a weight-for-weight basis. Up to date, some development has been made in establishing the influence of material and geometric parameters on the crashworthiness parameters of synthetic fibre-reinforced plastics. On the other hand, research work to generate energy absorption data for axial collapse of natural fibre and hybrid fibre reinforced composite tube is still young and few. This is main reason for carrying this work. Experimental investigations are carried out in order to study the effects of reinforcement type as well as different reinforcement arrangements on the crushing behaviour of axially compressed tubular composite specimens. To this end quasistatic experiments are performed on tubular composite specimens fabricated from glass fibre, carbon fibre, oil palm frond fibre and hybrid from glass and carbon fibre. Crashworthiness parameters are measured. Distinct differences are pointed out between the different reinforcement arrangements as well as for reinforcement type. It is found that Oil palm frond fibre/epoxy composite tubes appear to be of higher ratio between the instantaneous crushing load and the initial failure crush load when compared to the other tested types of composite tubes. Hybrid arrangements, consisting of carbon fibre in the middle layer exhibit high crashworthiness parameters.