Experimental Analysis of Bending and Tensile Behaviour of Aluminium-based Fibre Metal Laminates

This paper deals with experimental investigations of aluminium-based fibre metal laminates (FMLs) under quasi-static bending and tensile loading. The objectives are to study the failure modes, bending and tensile behaviour of the structure under bending and tensile loads. The FMLs in this paper comprised of layers of glass fibre-reinforced plastics sandwiched between layers of 0.3 mm and 0.6 mm aluminium alloy (2/1 and 3/2 FMLs plates) and bonded using epoxy adhesive. Two different types of glass fibre-reinforced plastics were used for fabrication: chopped strand mat (CSM) and woven roving (WR). In this work, both bending test and tensile test were performed using a Universal Testing Machine to determine out-of-plane bending properties and in-plane tensile properties respectively. In order to get the bending load-displacement response and investigate the deformation pattern, the bending test was run with bending rate of 2mm/min until the specimen fails using a three point bend setup. It was found that a 2/1 configuration yields the highest properties compared to any other configurations tested. In addition, the tensile test was run with load rate of 2mm/min up until the point of fracture. It was observed that the specimen behaved differently under in-plane loadings, but still a 2/1 configuration FMLs spot better properties and good deformation pattern. Lastly, corresponding deformation and failure modes (interface failure and delamination) are presented, compared and discussed. Keywords: Interface failure and delamination, Bending behaviour, Tensile behaviour, Fibre metal laminates, layered structure