Project Team
Students
James Ertter III
Mechanical Engineering
Penn State Altoona
Faculty Mentors
Md Fazlay Rabbi
Penn State Altoona
Division of Business, Engineering, and Information Sciences & Technology
Charles Bakis
Penn State University Park
Engineering Science and Mechanics
Project
https://sites.psu.edu/mcreu/files/formidable/2/Mechanical-behavior-of-carbon-fiber…-Poster1.pptx.pdf
Project Video
Project Abstract
Name: James Ertter III
Campus Affiliation: Penn State Altoona
Major: Mechanical Engineering
Anticipated Graduation Date: May 2025
Mentors: Md Fazlay Rabbi (Penn State Altoona); Charles Bakis (Penn State University Park)
Project Title: Mechanical behavior of carbon fiber reinforced additively manufactured polymer composite under cyclic loading.
Additive manufacturing has become a popular method of material fabrication due to the simplicity of designing a virtual model to be physically printed by depositing molten material in layers to achieve the desired shape. To meet the increasing popularity of this method of manufacturing, the strength of these printed parts needs to increase. To address this issue there have been studies into decreasing the porosity of these parts by reinforcing them with continuous unidirectional carbon fiber fabric. However, there has been no research on continuous plain weave carbon fiber reinforced composite. This research explores this gap by developing a novel additive manufacturing technique by reinforcing continuous plain weave carbon fiber between the polymer laminates. After a successful fabrication, a comprehensive experimental investigation was performed to observe the mechanical properties of the composite under quasi-static and cyclic loading. Specimens were fabricated by reinforcing with one or four layers of carbon fiber reinforcement. These specimens underwent cyclic tensile loading to determine the fatigue life of the carbon fiber reinforced additively manufactured composite. It was found from the stress-life (S-N) curve that specimens with 1 layer of reinforcement have higher fatigue life than specimens with 4 layers, yet the 1 layer specimens had a steeper decline in the curve. The Young’s modulus of the 1 layer specimens declined far less than the 4 layer specimens during cyclic loading. The failures for all stress values were fiber-dominated for 1 layer specimens. However, for 4-layer specimens, at higher loads, the failure was fiber-dominated while at lower loads there were cracks in the matrix and increasing levels of delamination as the load was decreased. Future work includes determining why there is a change in the failure mode at lower loads for 4-layer specimens.
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