An Experimental Investigation on Fracture Analysis of Polymer Matrix Composite under Different Thermal Cycling Conditions

Fracture analysis of glass/epoxy composites under different thermal cycling conditions is considered. Temperature difference, stacking sequence, fiber volume fraction and number of thermal cycles are selected as the experimental design factors. The Taguchi method is implemented to design of the experiment and an apparatus is developed for automatic thermal cycling tests. The tensile tests are done to study mechanical behavior of the specimens after the thermal cycling. The results show that the stacking sequence is the main effective factor on the fracture surface behavior of the specimens. Also, long splitting, lateral and angled breakage are the dominate failure mode of [0]8, [02/902]s and [0/±45/90]s layups, respectively. It’s found that the thermal cycling and temperature difference cause to increase the surface matrix loss significantly. This surface matrix loss can be an initial region to matrix debonding and crack propagation. Also, when the angle difference between lamina is increased the mechanical properties are reduced under the thermal cycling, significantly.