An Assessment of Mechanical Behavior on High Temperature and Different Volume Fraction of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composites

Abstract

Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials are the primary choice in various structural and high performance application facilitating the need from the last four decades. High specific strength, high specific modulus, high stiffness to weight ratio, and design flexibility enables FRP composite materials to be used in a large number of critical structural components in aircrafts, satellite structures, various automobile components, wind turbine blades, sport goods etc. The mechanical properties of glass fiber/epoxy composite is significantly altered by high temperature and volume fraction which exhibits the various types of the failure modes (e.g. delamination sites, debonding, fiber pullout regions, crack propagation front, striations and bubble bursting in the matrix). The glass/epoxy composites were prepared for two different volume fraction of 50/50 and 60/40 and SBS samples were thermally conditioned at 500c at ambient and for different time duration period of 1hr, 5hr and 7hr. Interlaminar shear behaviour may be used to characterize FRP composite material.DSC analysis shows Tg value increases with increase in thermal conditioning time w.r.t ambient Tg value for glass/epoxy composites. From the FTIR analysis we observe the band at 550-650 cm-1 is the spectra range of 50/50 volume fraction of the glass/epoxy system with the shifting of bandwidth with decrease in thermal conditioning time.