Toughness of a polymer is a key material property for energy absorbing capability for various engineering applications.
Significant effort has been made to improve toughness of a polymer and hence increase the energy absorbing capability;
typically rigid-particles in thermoplastics or rubbery modifiers in a brittle polymer matrix. The focus of this study is to
investigate toughening mechanisms of a thermoplastic polymer composite. Micron-size thermoplastic particle reinforced
polycarbonate (PC) composite materials was fabricated via a solution mixing method. The mechanical properties of the
polymer composites were characterized in tensile testing while the acoustic emission was monitored to assess the
material failure modes during the tensile test. Substantial improvement in tensile toughness was observed for the
polymer composites and the toughening mechanisms responsible for the improvement were identified and quantified for
each contribution to the observation.
Thermoplastic polymers are often reinforced by adding short fibers to improve mechanical properties including Young's
modulus and tensile strength of the polymers. In many engineering applications, energy absorbing characteristics in such
particulate polymers is known to be a very important property to be considered in composite designs, and meanwhile
debonding at the interface between fiber and matrix in the composites may affect the energy absorption properties. Here,
the focus of this study is to employ a semi-empirical approach to determine the debonding stress and investigate the
effect of the debonding stress on energy absorbing properties of short glass fiber reinforced polycarbonate composites.
Glass short fiber reinforced polycarbonate composites are fabricated via a solution mixing technique. Tensile testing and
acoustic emission measurement are simultaneously performed for the polycarbonate composites. The test results
including toughness are compared for the composites over neat polycarbonate. Also the local debonding stress in the
vicinity of each glass fiber in composites is estimated by combining modeling and experiments. A finite element model
is developed to determine local debonding stress at the interface between the fiber and matrix. The local debonding
stress appears to considerably affect the toughness of the composites.
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