Fatigue of Textile and Random Fibre Reinforced Composites

This book covers several aspects of the fatigue behavior of textile and short fiber reinforced composites. The first part is dedicated to 2D and 3D reinforced textile composites and includes a systematic description of the damage evolution for quasi-static and tensile-tensile fatigue loadings. Acoustic emissions and digital image correlation are considered in order to detect the damage modes’ initiation and development. The acoustic emission thresholds of the quasi-static loading are connected to the “fatigue limit” of the materials with distinctions for glass and carbon reinforcements.
The second part is devoted to the fatigue behavior of injection molded short fiber reinforced composites. Experimental evidence highlights the dependence of their fatigue response on various factors: fiber and matrix materials, fiber distribution, environmental and loading conditions are described. A hybrid (experimental/simulations) multi-scale method is presented, which drastically reduces the amount of experimental data necessary for reliable fatigue life predictions.

Valter Carvelli has been Professor of Solid and Structural Mechanics at Politecnico di Milano in Italy since 2007. His main research activity is dedicated to the experimental measurement and numerical prediction of the mechanical properties of composites, with particular attention to the fatigue response.

Atul Jain currently teaches in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. His interests lie in the intersection of manufacturing and mechanics of composites with a slight bias towards the latter.

Stepan Lomov is Professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium and coordinator of the Composite Materials Group. He is a specialist in the experimental and theoretical mechanics of composite materials and textiles.