Mechanical characterization of composite materials from curved structures

Abstract

Mechanical behavior of composite laminates depends strongly on the manufacturing process. It is necessary to use representative samples of the material, and therefore of the process. In the case of filament winding, specimens are necessarily cylindrical or barrel extracted. In our case, a full-scale fiberglass composite structure is used for radial compression and axial cuts experimental performances. This work aims to estimate the elastic properties of composite laminate from a curved structure taking into account the manufacturing process. An inverse approach using an optimization process is adopted. By coupling a radial compression experiment with a 3D model obtained by Finite Element Method (FEM), a mechanical characterization becomes possible. Furthermore, these identifications combined with experiments of axial cuts enable the estimation of residual manufacturing stresses.