Fatigue of Textile and Short Fiber Reinforced Composites

Book excerpt: This book covers several aspects of the fatigue behavior of textile and short fiber reinforced composites. The first part is dedicated to 2D and 3D reinforced textile composites and includes a systematic description of the damage evolution for quasi-static and tensile-tensile fatigue loadings. Acoustic emissions and digital image correlation are considered in order to detect the damage modes’ initiation and development. The acoustic emission thresholds of the quasi-static loading are connected to the “fatigue limit” of the materials with distinctions for glass and carbon reinforcements. The second part is devoted to the fatigue behavior of injection molded short fiber reinforced composites. Experimental evidence highlights the dependence of their fatigue response on various factors: fiber and matrix materials, fiber distribution, environmental and loading conditions are described. A hybrid (experimental/simulations) multi-scale method is presented, which drastically reduces the amount of experimental data necessary for reliable fatigue life predictions.