Failure of Carbon Fibers at a Crease in a Fiber-Reinforced Silicone Sheet

Abstract

Thin sheets of unidirectional carbon fibers embedded in a silicone matrix can be folded to very high curvatures, as elastic microbuckles with a half-wavelength on the order of 1 mm decrease the maximum strain in the fibers near the compression surface. This paper shows that probabilistic failure models derived from tension tests on individual fibers can be used to predict accurately the value of the outer surface curvature of the sheet, at which a small percentage of fibers break when a crease is formed in the sheet. The most accurate results are obtained by using a strain-based Weibull distribution of the failure probability in tension.

Computational modeling and simulation of rupture of membranes and thin films

“…There exists a number of other theoretical and/or computational approaches that may be used to study the mechanical response of structural fabrics [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], fibrous biological tissues [15,[29][30][31][32] and lipid membranes [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] (to cite just a few). Yet, to properly represent anisotropic deformation and rupture at the meso-or macro-scales, we believe that particle-based models (and, to some extent, models based on the network representation of [14][15][16][17]) are among the most suited.…”