Fatigue crack growth and propagation along the adhesive interface between fiber-reinforced composites

There is not yet a well-developed method to conduct in situ fatigue test for interface crack of composite material. This paper presents a specified loading setup based on DCB-Uneven Bending Moments (DCB-UBM) test, which can control the mixed modes of interface crack. During the loading process, CCD camera is used to in situ monitor and record the initiation of the fatigue crack and its growth rate. In addition, digital image correlation (DIC) method is adopted to obtain the deformation near the crack tip. Finally, the experimental results and DIC analysis demonstrate some meaningful mechanism of interfacial crack propagation for composite material.