CLOSED-FORM J-INTEGRAL AND ITS APPLICATIONS FOR MEASUREMENT OF MODE I INTERLAMINAR FRACTURE TOUGHNESS OF COMPOSITES

Abstract

Due to the interlaminar properties of composites are low, delamination is one of the major failure modes. It threatens the safety of composite structure subjected to out-of-plane static and especially impact loadings. High interlaminar fracture toughness is demanded in the society where composite structures are widely used. However, for tough material, large deformation may occur in the determination of the interlaminar fracture toughness when using the double cantilever beam (DCB) test. Therefore, accurate determination of the fracture toughness of tough material and dynamic loading is very challenging under large deformation. J-integral is an important parameter in fracture mechanics. It’s equivalent to energy release rate under monotonic loading and widely used in the determination of interlaminar fracture toughness of composites. In this paper, it is used to determine the fracture toughness for composite DCB under large deformation and wedge-insert double cantilever beam (WDCB) test, which is widely used to determine the dynamic interlaminar fracture toughness. Exact and closed form nonlinear J-integrals are derived for the largely deformed DCB and WDCB. Compared with the alternative data reduction methods for determining interlaminar fracture toughness, the J- integral method is more accurate. In addition, the J-integral method is simple and promising, since it is unnecessary to measure the crack length in the tests.