Fatigue Damage in CFRP Woven Fabric Composites through Dynamic Modulus Measurements

Advanced fiber reinforced composite materials offer substantial advantages over metallic materials for the structural applications subjected to fatigue loading. With the increasing use of these composites, it is required to understand their mechanical response to cyclic loading (1)-(4). Our major concern in this work is to macroscopically evaluate the damage development in composites during fatigue loading. For this purpose, we examine what effect the fatigue damage may have on the material properties and how they can be related mathematically to each other. In general, as the damage initiates in composite materials and grows during cyclic loading, material properties such as modulus, residual strength and strain would vary and, in many cases, they may be significantly reduced because of the progressive accumulation of cracks. Therefore, the damage can be characterized by the change in material properties, which is expected to be available for non-destructive evaluation of the fatigue damage development in composites. Here, the tension-tension fatigue tests are firstly conducted on the plain woven fabric carbon fiber composites for different loading levels. In the fatigue tests, the dynamic elastic moduli are measured on real-time, which will decrease with an increasing number of cycles due to the degradation of stiffness. Then, the damage function presenting the damage development during fatigue loading is determined from the dynamic elastic moduli thus obtained, from which the damage function is formulated in terms of a number of cycles and an applied loading level. Finally, the damage function is shown to be applied for predicting the remaining lifetime of the CFRP composites subjected to two-stress level fatigue loading