Abstract
Fiber Reinforced Plastics (FRP) has been applied in the aerospace field. In recent years, the application to the automobile field has been considering. In order to apply a FRP to the automobile field, not only the strength, but the fracture has to be determined, due to crash of a car. Authors have been working for the FRP to use of an energy absorbing device. In this paper, fracture mechanism analysis of the FRP tube at initial stage had been done with the consideration of continuous random fibers. Especially the initial micro-fracture of the trigger part of FRP tube was observed, and the transition process of initial micro-fracture to a continuous and stable fracture which is called ‘progressive crushing mode’ was analyzed.
