Fatigue life assessment of metal foils in multifunctional composites via combined experiments and simulations

In many applications metal foils are part of multifunctional composites exhibiting a wide range of (thermo-) mechanical fatigue loading. Data about low cycle fatigue of metallic foils subjected to tension-compression fatigue is sparse due to geometric limits. In this contribution, detailed information about design, tension-compression fatigue testing and data extraction of a layered sample are given. Fatigue failure of both copper and Pre-Preg are analysed using scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography. Numerical models are used to calculate the elastic and plastic strains for the copper foils within the composite sample, allowing a correlation to the observed fatigue life.