What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Fiber Reinforced Plastics

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Fiber reinforced composites have become increasingly important over the past few years and are now the first choice for fabricating structures where low weight in combination with high strength and stiffness are required. Fiber Reinforced Plastics (FRP) composites are in greatest commercial use. They have been extensively used in aerospace, automotive, marine and construction industries due to their inherent advantages over conventional metals. Failure modes of such laminated structures are also different than those of conventional metallic materials. Impact is one such great design limitation criteria involved in designing new composite products.
In this paper to characterize the damage occurred on fiberglass laminates subjected to mass impact. …show more content…

In practice, most composites consist of a bulk material (the ‘matrix’), and a reinforcement of some kind, added primarily to increase the strength and stiffness of the matrix. This reinforcement is usually in fibre form. In addition, the manufacturing process used to combinefibre with resin leads to varying amounts of imperfections and air inclusions. Typically,with a common hand lay-up process as widely used in the boat-building industry, alimit for Fibre Volume Fraction is approximately 30-40%. With the higher quality, more sophisticatedand precise processes used in the aerospace industry, Fibre Volume Fraction’s approaching 70% canbe successfully obtained.the geometry of the fibres in a composite is alsoimportant since fibres have theirhighest mechanical properties along their lengths, rather than across their widths.This leads to the highly anisotropic properties of composites, where, unlike metals,the mechanical properties of the composite are likely to be very different when testedin different directions. This means that it is very important when considering the use ofcomposites to understand at the design stage, both the magnitude and the directionof the applied

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