Fatigue Reliability Analysis Model for GFRP Composite Structures

GFRP 복합구조의 피로신뢰성 해석모형에 관한 연구

It is well known that the fatigue damage process in composite materials is very complicated due to complex failure mechanisms that comprise debounding, matrix cracking, delamination and fiber splitting of laminates. Therefore, the residual strength, instead of a single dominant crack length, is chosen to describe the criticality of the damage accumulated in the sublaminate. In this study, two models for residual strength degradation established by Yang-Liu and Tanimoto-Ishikawa that are capable of predicting the statistical distribution of both fatigue life and residual strength have been investigated and compared. Statistical methodologies for fatigue life prediction of composite materials have frequently been adopted. However, these are usually based on a simplified probabilistic approach considering only the variation of fatigue test data. The main object of this work is to propose a fatigue reliability analysis model which accounts for the effect of all sources of variation such as fabrication and workmanship, error in the fatigue model, load itself, etc. The proposed model is examined using the previous experimental data of GFRP and it is shown that it can be practically applied for fatigue problems in composite materials.