| Summary: | The research within the field of self-healing fibre reinforced polymers has been mainly focused on the development of novel healing chemistries and the application on damage scenarios where the damage volume and progression is contrived and pre-defined by the specimen geometry. Even though the potential of recovering the mechanical properties has been shown, limited amount of examples of the application of self-healing in more complex loading scenarios are found in the literature. The overall aim of this thesis is to apply self-healing within a higher complexity loading scenario resembling industrial relevant applications. Skin-stiffened structures combined with a vascular healing approach have been selected as the target scenario. Skin-stiffener debond specimen, mimicking the stress state at the tip of the flange, have been used to understand experimentally the damage progression under tensile-tensile fatigue. The damage progression has been manipulated by locally changing the fracture toughness with interleaves, transverse vascules and an oblique ply structure in order to steer efficiently the damage into predefined interfaces where the vascules are located. However, only moderate healing was obtained, reason being the small size of the connectivity between the vascules and the damage network. In contrast, efficient healing was demonstrated within strap lap and stringer run-out specimen tested under static tensile loading. The findings within this thesis suggest that there is a potential to recover damage occurring within industrial relevant structural applications, having the capacity to reduce conservative safety margins and therefore permitting to exploit the weight saving potential of fibre reinforced polymers.
|
|---|
