Mechanical Properties of Hybrid Glass/Carbon Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Composites

Abstract

Over the past three to four decades, the application of composite materials has been rising from traditional areas such as aircraft engineering to various fields (automobile industry, marines, civil engineering) because they have desired properties which cannot be achieved by other types of constituent materials. Fiber Reinforced Plastics (FRP) has significantly expanded their application in aerospace industry in recent years. Advantages like light weight, low cost, simple maintenance and superior corrosion resistance have been recognized although the design of fiber reinforced materials are typically not well understood as those for metallic counterpart. Long term degradation of FRP requires distinctive strength design methods, acceptance criteria, testing procedures, etc. Glass fibers alone have very less Young’s modulus, shear modulus and Poisson’s ratio and because of this disadvantage this material is not recommended for many works in aircrafts. On the other side, carbon fiber has very excellent mechanical properties but it’s too costly and the orientation of the fibers plays a vital role. For conducting the tests like tensile and compressive test for the flat FRP in universal testing machine is unavailable. In this paper, we discuss the new setup and system to conduct the above mentioned test for the flat FRP material and also conducting the test for the hybrid fiber reinforced plastic with glass and carbon fibers in the universal testing machine. From the tensile and compressive tests, the value of Young’s modulus, tensile strength and compressive strength and Poisson’s ratio of the hybrid FRP composite materials has been achieved.