Novel Methods for Assessment of Three-Dimensional Constitutive Properties for Composites

Abstract

Accurate three-dimensional stress-strain constitutive properties are essential for understanding of complex deformation and failure mechanisms for glass-fiber and carbon-fiber reinforced polymer-matrix composites. A large number of different methods and specimen types, which are currently required to generate three-dimensional allowables for structural design, slow down material characterization. Also, some of the material constitutive properties are never measured due to prohibitive cost of the specimens needed. This work shows that simple short-beam shear specimens are well-suited for measurement of 3D constitutive properties for composite systems. In particular, a methodology to measure tensile and compressive material properties, generate shear stress-strain curves and measure the shear strength in a simple short beam shear test will be presented. The methodology is based on the Digital Image Correlation (DIC) full-field deformation measurement. Short-beam and curved-beam tests are accomplished to generate 3D stress-strain response for glass/epoxy and carbon/epoxy tape composite material systems. Accuracy of constitutive properties is also verified using standard methods and data available in the public domain.