This paper describes new concepts the author has proposed and demonstrated to realize metal and polymer based sensitive and/or active structural material systems suitable for smart structures. Most of the developments have been done by simple and innovative methods without using sophisticated and expensive sensors and actuators. The following topics are mainly examined: (1) forming optical inte...

This paper investigates the hygrothermal effects on the failure mechanisms in bending of carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites. Accelerated diffusion testing was carried out by immersion at 50°C constant temperature and 70 bar hydrostatic pressure to study the effects of fresh or sea water diffusion into pre-preg CFRP laminates. Consequently the composite laminates were tested in be...

Shape, thickness and stacking sequence optimisation of a damage tolerant hybrid (GFRP-CFRP) composite laminate is performed using the commercial Optistruct solver. The results study are compared to both benchmark non-damage CFRP (without protective surface GFRP plies known as type 1 laminate) traditionally optimised CFRP-GFRP (having X shape 2 laminate), designed tested in previous study. manuf...

Abstract In this study, structurally efficient carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) sandwiches were developed via introducing pumice/Mg composite foams as new core material. The effects of the direction (0°, 45°, 90°) on mechanical properties CFRP laminates and studied. Compared with 45°-CFRP 90°-CFRP laminates, 0°-CFRP laminate exhibits outstanding flexural due to different failure modes. Co...

Drilling-induced delamination is among the major concerns of applying the fiber-reinforced composite materials in various industries. Core drill ossesses the advantage for reducing the delamination by distributing the drilling thrust force toward the drill periphery. The thrust force of core rill varying with the conditions in drilling carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) is experimentally in...

This paper offers a detailed, quantitative and exhaustive experimental comparison in terms of mechanical properties of three different layouts of carbon composite materials (CFRP) used to strengthen existing old timber beams highly affected by diverse natural defects and biological attacks, testing the use of pultruded laminate attached on the tension side of the element (LR), CFRP fabrics tota...

End anchors have been shown to significantly reduce premature plate end debonding failure of plate bonded strengthened reinforced concrete (r. c.) beams. One of the main interest in designing end anchors is to determine the minimum or optimal length of end anchors for a given thickness and height of the end anchor. This paper presents experimental and numerical studies in determining those opti...

Corrugated steel web with inherent high out-of-plane stiffness has a promising application in configuring large span highway bridge girders. Due to the irregularity of the configuration details, the local stress concentration poses a major fatigue problem for the welded flange plates of high strength low alloy structural steels. In this work, the methods of applying CFRP laminate and shot peeni...

The present study reports the influence of fiber orientation, laminate sequence and fabric type on the inherent nonlinearity of intact carbon fiber/epoxy composites using nonlinear resonant ultrasonic spectroscopy (NRUS) [1-2]. Fiber orientation of the CFRP samples were changed relative to the length of the sample. Since the fundamental flexural mode is excited, the properties of the composite ...

This paper developed three-dimensional (3D) Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to investigate the effect of fibre lay-up on the initiation of failure of laminated composites in bending. TsaiHill failure criterion was applied to identify the critical areas of failure in composite laminates. In accordance with the 3D FEA, unidirectional ([0]16), cross-ply ([0/90]4s) and angle-ply ([±45]4s) laminates m...