Effects of temperature on impact damages in CFRP composite laminates

In this paper, the effect of temperature variations (low and high temperatures) was studied experimentally on impact damage to CFRP laminates. The composite laminates used in this experiment were CF/EPOXY orthotropic laminated plates with lay-up [0 6/90 6] s and [0 4/90 4] s, and CF/PEEK orthotropic laminated plates with a lay-up of [0 6/90 6] s. A steel ball launched by the air gun was used to generate the CFRP laminate impact damage. For impact-damaged specimens, nondestructive evaluation (NDE), such as a scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) was performed on the delamination-damaged samples to characterize damage growth at different temperatures. Therefore, this study was undertaken to experimentally determine the interrelations between impact energy and impact damage (i.e. the delamination area and matrix) of CFRP laminates (CF/EPOXY and CF/PEEK) subjected to foreign object damages (FOD) at low and high temperatures.