The tensile fatigue behaviour of a silica nanoparticle-modified glass fibre reinforced epoxy composite

By C. Manjunatha, A. C. Taylor, A. Kinloch, S. Sprenger. 2010

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An anhydride-cured thermosetting epoxy polymer was modified by incorporating 10 wt.% of well-dispersed silica nanoparticles. The stress-controlled tensile fatigue behaviour at a stress ratio of R = 0.1 was investigated for bulk specimens of the neat and the nanoparticle-modified epoxy. The addition of the silica nanoparticles increased the fatigue life by about three to four times. The neat and the nanoparticle-modified epoxy resins were used to fabricate glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) composite laminates by resin infusion under flexible tooling (RIFT) technique. Tensile fatigue tests were performed on these composites, during which the matrix cracking and stiffness degradation was monitored. The fatigue life of the GFRP composite was increased by about three to four times due to the silica nanoparticles. Suppressed matrix cracking and reduced crack propagation rate in the nanoparticle-modified matrix were observed to contribute towards the enhanced fatigue life of the GFRP composite employing silica nanoparticle-modified epoxy matrix.

Subfields: Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63473f064fcb7bdbedad5bb0b6791b478df068e9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. Daniel R. Bortz
2. I. Martín-Gullón
3. C. Merino
4. O. Galao

Citations in the corpus

• Carbon nanofibers enhance the fracture toughness and fatigue performance of a structural epoxy system (2011, background): “The literature has indicated that the addition of rubber [16], metal [13], silica [17] and more recently CNTs [18-21] and graphene [12, 21] positively influence fatigue life and fatigue crack propagation rates when dispersed in epoxy matrices.”