Abstract
Despite the growing diffusion of composite materials in automotive and aerospace sectors, a standard procedure for testing their crashworthiness has not been developed yet. At present, the international standards for testing composite materials under impact conditions are not adequate to test their crush behavior. In this paper, a procedure for measuring the energy absorption due to the compressive crushing of a composite flat specimen, along its mid plane, is proposed. The experimental setup requires a fixture to hold the specimen and to avoid its buckling and an instrumented drop weight tower to obtain the force-displacement curves with the aim of calculating the Specific Energy Absorption. The paper will describe the adopted test procedure and some of the features of the newly developed experimental setup. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated by testing several glass fiber-epoxy specimens under different impact energies.
Highlights
The growing diffusion of composite materials in the automotive and aerospace sectors is mainly due to the excellent mechanical properties combined with low density
A new testing procedure to measure the crashworthiness of composite materials has been proposed
The crush force is measured during the test and allows to calculate the value of Specific Energy Absorption (SEA) of the material, that characterizes the behavior of the material during a crash
Summary
The growing diffusion of composite materials in the automotive and aerospace sectors is mainly due to the excellent mechanical properties combined with low density. The numerous studies carried out in last decades have built up a wide knowledge of composite materials, of their properties and of the manufacturing processes. The prediction of the behavior of this kind of structure is quite easy with current simulation algorithms, that allow to model the damage progression of metals with good accuracy. It is well-known in the literature that composite materials have good energy absorption capabilities and offer even better performance than metals in terms of specific energy absorption [3]. The simulation of the crash phenomenon in composite materials is extremely difficult because several failure mechanisms can occur, and each of them has a proper efficiency in terms of energy absorption [4]. The main studies on the failure modes of composites under crash have been carried out by Farley and Jones [4] and Hull [5], that have divided the failure modes in four main categories:
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