Abstract
Recently, polymeric composite materials are widely used in automotive applications for reducing structural weight, saving fuel, and improving performance. Accidentalimpact damage is an important issue in the use of these composite materials as body components. The damages or cracks in the present work were represented by notched specimens. The test specimens were fabricated from polyester resin reinforced by woven E-glass fiber. A series of tests were conducted to measure the notched strength of composite laminates with various types of through-the-thickness cracks such as central normal notch (CNN), center inclined notch (CIN), single edge notch (SEN) and double edge notch (DEN). A Modified Point Stress Criterion (MPSC) was proposed for predicting the tensile strength of composite laminates with various aspect ratio (a/w), that is, notch length to specimen width ratio.
The results show that the load–elongation diagrams of notched and unnotched glass fiber reinforced polyester (GFRP) specimens have a nonlinear behavior, with clear “Knee”, associated with audible noises. For the same notch length, the notched strength of GFRP specimens with symmetric cracks (CNN, CIN and DEN) is quite consistent. The lowest notched strength is for SEN specimens. An excellent agreement is found between the experimentalresults of centralnotched specimens (CNN and CIN) and the predicted values using the MPSC than the reviewed published theories. The critical stress intensity factor ( K
IC
) was determined from the centralnotched specimens and used to predict the notched strength of edge notched specimens (SEN and DEN). The type of the central notch (inclined or normal) insignificantly affects the values of the stress intensity factor, K
IC
.