Micro-cracking and delaminations of composite laminates under tensile quasi-static and cyclic loading

Sammanfattning: Aerospace industry is devoted to improving the aircraft performance while reducing its weight and limiting the emissions. Part of this objective can be accomplished with the use of high-performance long fibre reinforced polymer laminated composites. Being the first mode of damage under loading, intralaminar cracks initiate at the free edge of the off-axis plies and propagate along the respective fibre orientation. While these cracks grow as tunnels and increase in number, at some point two close cracks in plies of different off-axis orientation could intersect forming an envelope with the free edge. As loading continues, local delamination is expected within this envelope. The evolution and interactions of the different damage modes and the accumulation of damage under a specific loading are crucial in order to have a good understanding of the mechanisms and hence an accurate prediction of the mechanical properties´ degradation. This thesis is devoted to initiation and evolution of intralaminar cracking in plies and interlayer delamination in composite laminates.In the first part, quasi-isotropic Carbon Fibre/ Epoxy non-crimp fabric (NCF) laminates were studied under both quasi-static and cyclic loadings. The objective was to develop an efficient testing methodology for statistical damage evolution determination in Fatigue. The sequence of damage occurrences (intralaminar cracks in the different layers, delaminations at the different interfaces) loaded under quasi-static and tension-tension fatigue is first captured. To save characterisation time and costs, a simple model for predicting intralaminar cracking in laminates under cyclic loads was proposed and validated under low stress cyclic loads and low crack density. The model is based on Weibull distribution for the probability of cracking where part of parameters is obtained in quasi-static tests and part in a limited number of cyclic tests. The predictions of dependency of the cracking on the stress and number of cycles are validated against experimental observations of cracking in the 90-plies of quasi-isotropic NCF laminates as well as in tape based cross-ply laminates. In position where intralaminar cracks meet the specimen edge, local delaminations initiate due to the high 3D stress state. The delamination is further assisted by cracks in other off-axis plies, usually linking them. The average delamination length dependence on loading parameters is characterized and linked with the extent of the laminate stiffness reduction, showing using a simple ply-discount analysis that delaminations are the main reason for very large axial modulus reduction.In the second part, local delaminations and their effect on laminate stiffness are analysed using FEM. Expressions for the crack opening displacement (COD) determined using FEM are obtained and a modelling approach based on GLOB-LOC is performed for intralaminar crack case with local delaminations starting from the intralaminar crack. The delamination length is used as a parameter and studies are performed for different materials. Strong effect of delaminations on COD and on the axial modulus of the laminate is found. Finally, the last findings are used to simulate the damaged composite laminate behaviour in 4-point bending test. The bending stiffness of the laminate is significantly reduced by intralaminar cracks with delaminations. An approach, using the concept of the effective stiffness of the damaged ply is used. The so obtained effective stiffness matrix is a function of intralaminar crack density in the ply and the delamination length. The effective stiffness is used to calculate the bending stiffness of the damaged laminate. The laminate curvature calculated in this way is in a very good agreement with the curvature obtained in 3-D FEM simulations of the test with explicitly including cracks and delaminations in the model.