Mechanics of Advanced Composite Structures

Mechanics of Advanced Composite Structures

Investigation of Fatigue Phenomenon in Short-Fiber Reinforced Composites

Document Type : Research Article

Authors
Roham Rafiee
Alireza Mohammad Shirazi
Composites Research Laboratory, College of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, University of Tehran, 1439957131, Tehran, Iran
10.22075/macs.2026.39889.1960
Abstract
Nowadays, the use of short fiber reinforced composites (SFRC) has become very widespread. In the meantime, the investigation of the fatigue behavior of this group of composites is a very demanding topic. In this research, the behaviour of SFRC is computationally studied under cyclic loading for both aligned and randomly-oriented SFRC. As a novel approach, a methodology developed for long-fiber composites is adopted for the purpose of fatigue analysis of SFRC through a micro-macromechanical approach. Namely, the aligned SFRC is firstly converted into a virtual long-fiber composite at the microscale, and then fatigue analysis is performed at the macroscale. For a randomly-oriented SFRC composite, the laminate analogy approach is employed to transform it into virtual long-fiber laminated composites, and then fatigue analysis is implemented. The estimated results through computational modelling are compared with available experimental observations in the literature. The discrepancy between predictions and experimental measurements for aligned SFRC falls below 10%, implying proper performance of the proposed method for aligned SFRC. However, some improvements are required for the specific purpose of randomly-oriented SFRC, since the discrepancy exceeds 25%.
Keywords
Fatigue analysis
Short fibers
Computational modeling
Progressive damage modeling
Micro-macromechanical modeling
Subjects
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Mechanics of Advanced Composite Structures
Volume 14, Issue 2 - Serial Number 30
In Progress
November 2027
Pages 439-447