Mechanical properties of hybrid woven roving and chopped strand mat glass fabric reinforced polyester composites

Abstract

In high-performance composites’ manufacturing industries, glass fibers are one of the most important reinforcements with excellent mechanical properties. The aim of the work is to compare the mechanical behavior of two types of glass fiber reinforced polyester composites. Woven roving (W) and chopped strand mat glass fiber (C), for different layers (2, 4, and 6) respectively, were used to fabricate the composites by hand lay-up method. Moreover, the hybrid mixture of the two types of fibers was also fabricated for (2, 4, and 6) layers. The mechanical properties that are included in tensile, impact, and flexural. Also, the morphology properties were used to examine through scanning electronic microscope (SEM). The results show that the mechanical properties of the composites improved by increasing the number of layers of glass fibers. The composites W/UP have better impact strength, while C/UP composites exhibit better flexural behavior than W/UP. However, the hybrid composites WC/UP dominate the best mechanical properties. The morphology analyses supported the mechanical results. From Design of Experements (DOE), it is found that the composites follow the order WC/UP > W/UP > C/UP in terms of tensile strength, and WC/UP > C/UP > W/UP for flexural strength. While the impact strength in the order W/UP > WC/UP > C/UP composites.