Abstract
A combined experimental and numerical study has been carried out in order to study the mechanism of initial failure in transversely loaded CF/epoxy composites. The failure initiation under transverse tensile loading was investigated in a scanning electron microscope (SEM). It was observed that interfacial failure was the dominating failure mechanism for both materials. The applied load that caused initial failure in the experiment was applied as a global load in a microscopic finite element (FE) calculation. The numerical calculation could explain the experimentally observed results. Furthermore an upper limit of the interfacial normal (INS) and shear (ISS) strength was determined.
