Fatigue behaviour of infrared welded joints in fibre reinforced thermoplastics

Due to the increasing interest in fibre reinforced thermoplastics, there is also a need for a reliable means of bonding them. As thermoplastics have a high chemical inertness, adhesive bonding is not always an option and thus, fusion bonding might prove an interesting solution. This manuscript presents an infrared welding process for a carbon fabric reinforced polyphenylene sulphide. A one sided and a two sided welding process is described and the welding parameters are optimised by performing quasi-static lapshear tests for different welding parameters. As the two sided welding process yields the most promising results with respect to reproducibility and strength, two sided welded specimens are also tested under fatigue loading conditions. Here, the applied maximum load has a large influence on the fatigue life and when lower load levels are considered, significant crack growth occurs before final failure