Systematic approach on conducting fatigue testing of unidirectional continuous carbon fibre composites

Sammanfattning: High fuel saving potentials, increased load carrying capacities and therefore competitive advantages force the heavy goods vehicle industry to enhance the efforts towards comprehensive lightweight designs. Facing this challenge, the material evaluation in terms of simulations and physical testing of composite materials is required for the design against fatigue failure due to road introduced vibrations. Eliminating fatigue testing issues in order to gain acceptable and reproducible results, a future-oriented systematic approach on conducting constant amplitude tension-tension fatigue testing on a unidirectional composite material is presented. Following the material characterisation of the carbon/epoxy material in terms of tensile and shear properties as well as fibre volume fraction, several combinations of tab configurations and specimen geometries have been tested with regard to their suitability for fatigue testing. Finally, the unidirectional material was successfully tested under tension-tension fatigue and first elaborated test data were assessed. In conclusion, the usage of straight aluminium tabs completely clamped inside the grips and bonded to the straight-sided specimen with 3M DP420 adhesive, using ventilation during the test is the recommended test procedure.