Design, manufacture and testing of self-sensing carbon fibre–glass fibre reinforced polymerrods

Abstract

At present much attention is being devoted to the study of self-monitoring materials, whichsimultaneously offer good structural and sensing properties. In the present studyself-sensing carbon–glass hybrid structural composites, behaving as ‘guard’ sensors (i.e. theygive a warning when fixed loads are reached) were designed, manufactured and tested. Inparticular, samples containing different carbon fibre/glass fibre ratios were preparedand tested, by performing both mechanical (monotonic and cycle tensile tests)and electrical measurements. The results showed the efficiency of the proposedsystem and the possibility to design such materials to suit any specific applicationneed. The advantages of these materials, compared to other more sophisticatedmonitoring systems, are the ease of fabrication and use, low production costs andversatility, so such materials are suitable for widespread low-cost applications.