Damage Development in Woven Fabric Composites during Tension-Tension Fatigue

Impacted woven fabric composites were tested in tension-tension fatigue. In contrast to results from static testing, the effects of low energy impact damage in a fatigue environment were found to be the critical element leading to failure of the specimen. This difference emphasizes the need to identify and understand the fatigue damage mechanism. A relatively new non-destructive inspection technique using infrared thermography was found to be a very useful tool in detecting damage initiation and growth. Furthermore, this technique supplies valuable information to the characterization of the operating fatigue damage mechanism(s). Fatigue leads to a degradation of material properties. Consequently, in connection with impact induced local stress raisers, fatigue produces continuously changing non-uniform stress fields because of stress redistribution effects. Other models addressing evolution of fatigue damage in composite materials have not been able to simulate evolving non-uniform stress fields. Therefore. in the second part of this paper. an analytical/numerical approach capable of addressing these issues is also proposed.