Volume 10, Issue 6, 2001

Quantification of the Internal Topology of Continuous Fiber Composites

S.C. Barwick & T.D. Papathanasiou

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208

(Received 9/01; accepted 11/01)

Abstract

We describe the usage of Large Area Automated Microscopy (LAAM) for the topological characterization of entire cross-sections of pultruded carbon fibre reinforced rods, an essential step in developing currently unavailable quantitative correlations between processing conditions and component properties. We demonstrate with three pultruded rod samples that LAAM data can be used to reconstruct the internal topology of a composite material, evaluate the degree of fibre clustering, and quantify fibre misalignment.

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