ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an approach to predict the effect of material and manufacturing uncertainty on the fatigue life of multiscale composites. The micromechanics fatigue durability simulation utilized closed-form solutions from the ideas of T. Mori–K. Tanaka, classical laminate theory, and multiscale multiphysics progressive failure analysis of a unit cell. Manufacturing the advanced nanocomposite material system is quite challenging, for example: uniformly dispersing the nanoparticles in the matrix, improving the interface between the matrix and the particles for proper load transfer from matrix to the nanoparticles, and removing voids among others. The multiscale micromechanics technique was used to first predict in situ material properties of constituents from macro-level test data available from the literature. The predictions were made using limited macro-level test data. The predicted in situ constituent properties were used to predict the fatigue life and perform probabilistic material uncertainty sensitivity analyses for glass fibre reinforced polymer composites reinforced with nanoparticles in the epoxy matrix.