Investigation of Stress Distribution in Glass Fiber Reinforced Composite Materials with Microvascular Channels Under Transverse Loading and Bending

Abstract

Fiber reinforced polymer composites are widely utilized in the defense industry, aerospace, infrastructure and automotive industries. These materials have important properties like, durability, lightness, high strength and cost efficiency.

In this study, a glass fiber-reinforced polymer composite material with an embedded microvascular channel is researched for its stress distribution under transverse loads. Several research studies have been conducted on vascularized composites, aiming to develop techniques for health monitoring and self-healing through vascular channels. In spite of the aforementioned benefits, there is a trade-off regarding the reduction in mechanical strength where the microvascular channels are introduced. The main reason behind this is, the disruption of fiber architecture around the vascule, creating resin-rich pocket, leading to stress concentrations. By evaluating the stress concentrations under transverse loads and bending for different stacking configurations, the study aims to give insight for optimum configuration.

The study contains a general information about fiber-reinforced composite materials to grasp the basic knowledge about the classical laminate theory along with the manufacturing of the fiber reinforced polymer with microvascular channel. The geometry and dimension of the model near vascular channel is obtained by micro-pictures. Then, FEM is developed and validated with comparing the results obtained with the studies in the literature. The stress distributions for transverse tension, transverse compression and bending are analyzed for resin-rich pocket. The results showed that, UD90 configuration has the highest stress concentration while UD0 has the lowest under transverse loading. Under bending loads, by comparing the laminas with and without microchannels, it is found that [90/0]3s is the configuration that has the lowest stress difference. For this reason the optimum stacking configuration is found out to be [90/0]3s.