Issue 55

L. Vigna et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 55 (2021) 76-87; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.55.06

An innovative fixture for testing the crashworthiness of composite materials

Lorenzo Vigna, Iman Babaei, Ravin Garg, Giovanni Belingardi, Davide Salvatore Paolino Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

lorenzo_vigna@polito.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5913-253X iman.babaei@polito.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6471-5094 ravin.garg@polito.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5473-7436 giovanni.belingardi@polito.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1378-1902 davide.paolino@polito.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4231-4580 Andrea Calzolari, Giuseppe Galizia ITW Test and Measurement Italy, Italy andrea_calzolari@instron.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2605-7203 giuseppe_galizia@instron.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9837-286X

A BSTRACT . Despite the growing diffusion of composite materials in automotive and aerospace sectors, a standard procedure for testing their crashworthiness has not been developed yet. At present, the international standards for testing composite materials under impact conditions are not adequate to test their crush behavior. In this paper, a procedure for measuring the energy absorption due to the compressive crushing of a composite flat specimen along its mid plane is proposed. The experimental setup requires a fixture to hold the specimen and to avoid its buckling and an instrumented drop weight tower to obtain the force-displacement curves with the aim of calculating the Specific Energy Absorption. The paper describes the adopted test procedure and some of the features of the newly developed experimental setup. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated by testing several glass fiber-epoxy specimens under different impact energies. K EYWORDS . Crashworthiness; Specific Energy Absorption; Impact response.

Citation: Vigna L., Babaei I., Garg R., Belingardi G., Paolino D.S., Calzolari A., Galizia G., An innovative fixture for testing the crashworthiness of composite materials, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 55 (2021) 76- 87.

Received: 16.09.2020 Accepted: 29.10.2020 Published: 01.01.2021

Copyright: © 2021 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

I NTRODUCTION

he growing diffusion of composite materials in the automotive and aerospace sectors is mainly due to the excellent mechanical properties combined with low density. Other features like the possibility to design the material properties choosing the right combination of matrixes, fibers, curing cycles and manufacturing processes have made composites the best choice for those applications where high performances are needed. T

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