Fatigue behavior of notched GFR/EPOXY composites

Recently, fiber reinforced composite materials are brought into greater use in the industries of aircraft, automobiles and especially solar vehicles, because of theirlight density and high specific strength. In these applications the fatigue loads are usualJy unavoidable. For this reason resent designs don’t specify static strength alone as a primary design criterion but also include fatigue analysis.The demand for improved performance of structural materials in transportationindustries, particularly in aircraft, makes fatigue analysis as importantconsideration. The main objective of the present work is to study the static and the fatigue behaviors of angle-ply [O/±30/±60/90] s glass fib er reinforced epoxy (GFRE) composites.The unidirectional and angle-ply composite laminates were manufactured using Hand lay-up technique. Tension test were carried out on unnotchedunidirectional and angle-ply composite laminates. The elastic properties of theunidirectional GFRE composites were used in prediction of the elastic properties of the angle-ply composites using Classical lamination theory (CLT). Bendingbehavior of notched and unnotched angle-ply specimens were investigated understatic and fatigue loads. In static bending test, four different hole diameters werenotched (2, 4.5, 7, 9 mm) at the center of the specimens, but in fatigue test threedifferent hole diameters were notched (4.5, 7, 9 mm) at the center of thespecimens. The two-parameter Weibull function is used to investigate thestatistical analysis of static and fatigue properties.The results show that the failure modes of unidirectional specimens are different from angle-ply GFRE specimens. The elastic properties of the angle-ply