ABSTRACT
The present work examines the potential of improving the mechanical properties of synthetic composites by using composite architectures observed in biological materials. The static, impact, and fatigue behavior of biomimetic CFRP laminates with stacking sequences similar to those found in animal hard tissues such as fish scales or insect cuticles are compared to those of a standard quasi-isotropic and a cross-ply laminates.
The biomimetic laminate has a higher resistance to the notch for the larger hole diameters than the quasi-isotropic and cross-ply laminates. It is shown that the damage tolerance of the laminate depends apparently on the architecture of the laminate and the damage tolerance of biomimetic laminate is more advantageous than the two other laminates. The implications of the findings for the design of damagetolerant laminates are further discussed.
It is also shown that the bending strength as well as rigidity, and fatigue resistance of quasi-isotropic laminate are influenced remarkably by the directions of laminate, longitudinal and transverse directions. On the other hand, those of biomimetic laminate did not differ significantly for the different direction of the laminate. This indicates that the biomimetic laminate has a more quasi-isotropic characteristic than the conventional quasi-isotropic laminate.
