Application of X-ray Computed Tomography to Measuring Fiber Orientation Distribution of Chopped Carbon Fiber Tape Reinforced Thermoplastics

Evaluating the internal geometry of carbon fiber reinforced plastics is important to predict its mechanical properties and fracture behavior. In this study, we employed two different commercially available image processing software – AVIZO and 3D-Bon to analyze the fiber orientation distribution (FOD) of the chopped carbon fiber tape reinforced thermoplastics (CTT) by processing the imaged volume observed from an X-ray computed tomography (CT) system. To clarify the capability of the CT observation and subsequent analysis, the elastic modulus of CTT was estimated analytically based on the FOD data. Meanwhile, the experimental results were selected as the reference value for qualification. The local FOD, which was obtained from an individual observation, presented local anisotropy and stochastic dispersion of the fiber strands, while we found that the representative FOD of CTT can be acquired by performing CT observation and analysis on more than 15 samples. The statistical analysis and cross section observation were performed to validate the reliability of multi-sample observation.