Fatigue bearing failure of CFRP composite in biaxially loaded bolted joints at elevated temperature

Hybrid composite-aluminium structures develop internal loads when exposed to elevated temperatures, due to the different thermal expansion properties of the constituent materials. In aircraft structures with long rows of bolted joints, the mechanical and the thermally induced bolt loads are oriented in different directions, creating a biaxial bearing load state. In this study, the bearing fatigue failure process and the influence of the biaxial load state on the failure are investigated. An experimental set-up was designed, where both the mechanical and the thermally induced bolt loads were applied by means of mechanical load actuators. Two-bolt, double-lap joints with quasi-isotropic carbon–epoxy composite specimens were subjected to uniaxial and biaxial cyclic loading at 90 °C. A microscopy study of the bearing plane revealed that the main fatigue driving mechanisms were matrix cracking and fibre–matrix debonding. Motivated by these findings, a fatigue prediction model based on the kinetic theory of fracture for polymer matrices was run in a finite element code and the results showed a satisfactory correlation to the experimental results. The biaxial loading resulted in a longer fatigue life than the uniaxial loading, for the same peak resultant force, which was explained by the smaller effective stress range in the biaxial case.