Abstract
The effect of specimen size on the tensile strength of a unidirectional carbon/epoxy laminate in the fiber direction is systematically examined. For this purpose, static tension tests are performed on one-, two- and three-dimensional geometrically similar unnotched specimens of the unidirectional CFRP laminate, respectively. The comparison of the results on 1D-geometrically similar specimens indicates that the longitudinal tensile strength tends to decrease as the thickness of specimen increases. In contrast, the longitudinal tensile strength of 2D-geometrically similar specimen tends to increase as the width of specimen increases. 3D-geometrically similar specimens exhibit substantially no scale effect, suggesting that 1D and 2D scale effects almost cancel each other out. Development of a phenomenological model that can describe the multi-dimensional scale effects is also attempted.
