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Abstract
The issue of time and temperature dependencies is considered in the behaviour of advanced fibre-reinforced polymer composite materials. Currently, for the vast majority of analyses of composite structures, time and temperature are considered invariant. In an effort to further improve the design of composite structures, more advanced analyses are now being developed to accurately capture the behaviour under a range of conditions. Various events and load cases in which time and temperature are critical are described in general terms. The specific cases of viscoelastic distortion under mechanical and thermal loading, the behaviour of adhesive joints and the structural response of composites to fire are discussed in detail. The key material response, characterisation methods and analysis approaches developed are described. It is observed that key challenges in the development of improved predictive models are measurement of time- and temperature-dependent material properties and the implementation of efficient multidisciplinary analysis methods.
Acknowledgements
The work presented in this paper has been generated under the research programme of CRC-ACS, and the authors wish to acknowledge those who contributed from the Centre and the Participant organisations. Specifically, the significant contributions made by Dr A. Chan (Monash University), Dr Z. Zhou (Monash University) and A/Prof. W.K. Chiu (Monash University) in the development of viscoelastic material models used in the viscoelastic distortion analysis, Dr A.A. Baker (CRC-ACS), Dr C.H. Wang (DSTO) and Dr A. Harman (DSTO) to the modelling of adhesive joints, and the support for the fire research from Prof. A.P. Mouritz (RMIT University) and the US Office of Naval Research (Grant Nos. N00014-04-10026 and N00014-07-10514) are gratefully acknowledged.