Experimental and computational investigation of the blast response of Carbon-Epoxy weathered composite materials

Dynamic blast loading experiments were performed on simply supported and fully clamped specimens, to determine the effects of the boundary conditions on the Carbon-Epoxy specimen response. The Weathered (30 and 60 days) and Non-Weathered (0 day) specimens displayed dramatically different behavior after being subjected to a blast load. For the simply supported case, Non-Weathered specimens displayed an average maximum out of plane displacement of 20 mm and recovered elastically. Weathered specimens, both 30 and 60 days exhibited similar initial transient behavior but failed catastrophically due to through thickness cracking at the point of maximum deflection. For the fixed boundary condition, the Non-Weathered specimens displayed an average maximum out of plane displacement of 5.57 mm, whereas the 30 day and 60 day weathered specimens displayed a maximum out of plane displacement of 6.89 mm and 6.96 mm, respectively. The corresponding numerical simulations matched well with the experimental data. However, for the fixed boundary case, the beam vibration of the simulation was off phase with the experimental results due to imperfect boundary conditions in the experiments.