Develop a novel approach to evaluate the fracture energies in a 3D delamination.

This PhD project has the purpose to design experiments in order to characterize and understand the governing parameters in the fracture process zone during a 3D delamination process under quasi- static and fatigue loading, regardless of material or crack front orientation as well as formulation of models describing the process.

Layered fiber reinforced polymers; in short composites, are used in a wide variety
of applications today, ranging from consumer electronics over bicycle frames and
components, to ships, wind turbine blades and airplanes. Despite a lot of research
over the last 30 years, there are still many uncertainties when designing composite structures. One of the main sources of failure of these composite structures is due to delamination as a result of the essential weak interface properties between the layers. A lot of research has been committed to establishing mathematical Laws that describes the fibrous or cohesive zone, responsible for increasing the toughness in the fracture process zone, which is located after the crack front. This is mostly done for unidirectional composites, where the fibers are all oriented in one direction.

Recent work has been dedicated to multi-directional oriented fiber layers, with no
clear outcome.