Plane Strain Fracture Behaviour of Fabric Reinforced Hybrid Composites under varied Notch Configurations

摘要

Utilization of fabric reinforced hybrid polymer composites has increased tremendously in many engineering fields. The present investigation is an attempt on fabric-reinforced hybrid composite laminates with different volume fractions of the constituent materials; epoxy resin, plain-woven glass fabric, and textile satin fabric. Fracture toughness of a material has immense importance in the determination of the resistance of the material to crack propagation. Hence in this article, impact behaviour and fracture toughness of the laminates were investigated as per ASTM-D256 standards. Specimen configuration includes selection of different notch depths, fiber proportion and orientations. The fracture toughness has been found to increase continuously with increased volumes of glass fabric and significantly dependent on the notch size. Experimental results are validated using analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique, and found that percentage contribution of glass content is approximately 80%, while notch depth and orientation have contributed only 16%.