Abstract
Fiber metal laminates (FML) are a new class of
laminated composite materials having superior mechanical
properties such as excellent strength to weight ratio and fatigue
life. These characteristics have significantly increased their
applications in aerospace industry and high performance sports
equipment. Laminates in FML are bonded together by adhesive
joints using high grade epoxy resins. These adhesive joints are
weak regions and may result in inter-ply failure i.e.,
delamination due to debonding of adhesive in joint under
transverse loading conditions. This work aims at strengthening
of adhesive joints using modified epoxy resins containing
different weight percentage (wt %) of multiwalled carbon
nano-tubes (MWCNTs). Finite element analysis (FEA) was
used for simulating mode-I fracture in adhesive joint. ABAQUS
v13.0 is commercially available software used for this analysis.
Simulation in this paper was done using extended finite element
method (XFEM) approach as this numerical technique is very
popular and successfully used for precisely simulating
delamination failure due to debonding. The simulations were
carried out on double cantilever beam (DCB) test as per ASTM
D5528 standard. Multiple simulations were carried out and in
these simulations Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) was adhesive
bonded by epoxy containing 0 wt% (neat epoxy), 1 wt% and 2
wt% MWCNTs. The results were obtained as forcedisplacement curves for each simulation carried out by XFEM
and these curves were used for development of toughnessdelamination curves. Later these results were compared with
the results of specimen bonded by neat epoxy.
Shahzeb Khokhar, Syed Wilayat Husain, Tassawar hussain, Mohsin Ali Fakhar, Rizwan Zafar. (2019) Numerical and experimental analysis of fracture toughness improvement using multi-walled carbon nanotube modified epoxy in fiber metal laminate joints, Journal of Space Technology , Volume 9, Issue 1.
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