Mechanical behavior of long discontinuous glass fiber nylon composite produced by in-situ polymerization

The present work studied the mechanical behavior of organosheets produced using 1″ long glass fiber, which are incorporated within an in-situ polymerized polyamide 6 (nylon) matrix. The meso-scale morphology of the glass fiber bundles is preserved during the impregnation process, resulting in the collimated fibers. A finite-element computational model was developed to predict the effective tensile and flexural properties (modulus as well as strength) and was used to understand the failure behavior of the fiber reinforced PA6 organosheet. The continuum damage modeling was employed to describe various failure modes in bundles and PA6 pockets. The proposed computational framework was used to analyze the role of bundle degree of alignment in organosheet on the effective tensile and flexural response. Furthermore, the effect of specimen size on the flexural behavior was studied. The material system revealed a strong dependence of the tensile and flexural response with the degree of alignment in bundles.