Composite Interlaminar Fracture: Effect of Matrix Fracture Energy

Abstract

Numerous recent studies of composite delamination behavior have used the double cantilever beam test to provide a measure of the interlaminar fracture energy of a composite subjected to simple Mode-1 type loading. A major result from these tests has been the observation that increasing the toughness of the matrix resin by a large amount, say twenty-fold, produced a major (approximately fourfold) benefit in this interlaminar fracture energy [1–7]. At present, however, the detailed relationship between resin and composite interlaminar behaviors has not been clearly established because no single study has examined resins with a wide enough range of toughnesses. The purpose of this note is to combine the data from three recent papers [6,8,9] in an effort to make such a comparison for simple Mode-I type loading.