Research On The Mechanical Fatigue Performance Of Glass Fibre Reinforced Plastic

With the rapid development of the science and technology, owing to the outstanding performance of Glass Fibre Reinforced Plastic (GFRP) in several respects such as the mechanical properties, fatigue properties and designability, it has been widely used in plenty areas. However, composite materials damaged regularly during applications due to the stress and the environmental factors. Fatigue failure is one of the major failure modes. Therefore, fatigue failure analysis is vital for GFRP.Firstly, this paper reviews a great deal of literatures about the fatigue failure of GFRP. Meanwhile, it summarizes the macro-phenomenological fatigue damage model including the residual strength model and the residual stiffness model. Afterwards, choosing vinyl ester resin and bisphenol A epoxy resin as matrix material and using various ways to prepare the GFRP laminates. Through the dynamic fatigue test, this paper analyzes the influence of stress amplitude, layer mode and resin system on the mechanical fatigue performance of GFRP, and derives the suitable fatigue life model according to the experiment.The experiment shows that the tensile modulus and flexural modulus of the GFRP decreased monotonously along with the increasing of the stress amplitude. There is a plateau region in the fatigue curve of the laminate which means the cumulating of fatigue when the stress amplitude is 30%. The fatigue curve is a linear monotonic decline which means a sudden fatigue failure when the stress amplitude rose to 50%. Furthermore, the tension-tension fatigue and bending fatigue the performance of GFRP will be significantly decreased as the number of layers increasing. In other words, the fatigue life is shortened at the macro level. In addition, the fatigue performance of composites with a bisphenol A epoxy resin matrix is significantly better than the one with vinyl ester resin matrix. Moreover, the S-N curve of the tension-tension fatigue life model which is based on the two-parameter glass fibre reinforced epoxy composite model is consistent with the experimental data.