Intrinsic Safety Factors for Glass & Carbon Fibre Composite Filament Wound Structures

The determination of intrinsic safety factors for glass and carbon fibre unidirectional composites and filament wound internally pressurised structures, is described. In such structures the fibres are placed on geodesic paths and the pressure induces tensile forces in them. The fibres ensure the strength of the composite and must break for it to fail. Failure is seen in such structures, to depend mainly on the accumulation of fibre breaks. These are initially randomly distributed but become critical when clusters of breaks develop. Long term behaviour of carbon fibre composites is controlled by the viscoelastic relaxation of the matrix around breaks, which can lead to further delayed fibre breaks. Failure in glass fibre structures can additionally be induced by stress corrosion of the glass fibres. This process does not seem to occur with carbon fibres and as the latter are increasingly used in critical structures emphasis is given to them. Until the development of clusters of fibre breaks, in a filament wound structure, no macroscopic changes in the composite behaviour are evident so that failure occurs in a sudden death manner. Multi-scale simulation, taking into account the characteristics of the composite components and scaling up their behaviour under load, accurately describes the overall behaviour of the composite structure. This approach not only allows the behaviour to be described, as a function of time, but also calculates the scatter which will occur in the behaviour of the structure. This allows the intrinsic safety factors of the composite structure to be quantified.