The market’s demand for carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite has dramat­i­cally increased due to its signif­i­cant appli­ca­tions and advan­tages in indus­try. Typical loading on the struc­tures that are made up by this mater­ial often involves tensile and lateral bending of the compos­ite laminates. These include transient and fatigue loading. Carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite struc­tures under applied loading will undergo several damages and fracture modes such as matrix yield­ing, matrix crack­ing, fiber pull-out, fiber fracture, inter-ply delam­i­na­tion or fiber/matrix inter­face debonding.

These damages may appear individ­u­ally or inter­act collec­tively, which can later lead to catastrophic struc­ture failure. Thus, relia­bil­ity assess­ment of the carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite struc­ture is absolutely criti­cal, taking into account the damage initi­a­tion, damage propa­ga­tion and final failure. Further­more, the versa­til­ity of the materi­als that are exploited under higher stress and strains justi­fies the need for more reliable data.

The project super­vised by Hector Fellow Peter Gumbsch aims to identify the dominant damage mecha­nisms in carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite struc­tures and their inter­ac­tions under static and cyclic condi­tions. It aims, in partic­u­lar, at defin­ing the inter­ac­tion effects between the neigh­bor­ing laminates. Apart from that, the project also aims to deter­mine the mecha­nism and to observe the phenom­e­non of inter-ply failure during the failure process of carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite laminates. The study should result in a proposed model to predict damage and failure modes that evolve within carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite. This model is expected to be able to predict the relia­bil­ity of the carbon fiber/epoxy compos­ite under both monot­o­nic and fatigue loading.