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Mechanics of Fibre-reinforced Composites

This teaching and learning package (TLP) gives an introduction to the nature of fibre-reinforced composite materials and their basic mechanical characteristics.

Photoelastic frozen stress images, showing matrix strain fields around short fibre reinforcements with ellipsoidal and cylindrical shapes, generated by an applied axial load

Aims
Before you start
Introduction
Stiffness of long fibre composites
Strength of long fibre composites
Composite vaulting poles – why don´t they break?
Toughness of composites and fibre pull–out
Off–axis loading of a lamina
Stiffness of laminates
Tensile–shear interactions and balanced laminates
Out–of–plane stresses and symmetric laminates
Failure of laminates and the Tsai–Hill criterion
Summary
Questions
Going further

Begin

First created: August 2007. Last updated: January 2008. Converted to HTML5: April 2019.