Fracture failure analysis of automotive accelerator pedal arms with polymer matrix composite material

The booming automotive industry is undoubtedly not independent of the extensive applications of composite materials, especially the polymer matrix composite materials, aiming to optimize the price versus performance ratios. Actually, considering safety and reliability are the prior concerns of vehicles, evaluation of the ‘performances’ must never be stopped, from both laboratories and actual services. In this paper, fracture failure incidents of the automotive accelerator pedal arms with matrix of long glass fiber reinforced polypropylene were systematically investigated. Based on the analysis results of matrix materials inspection and fractograph observation, root causes of the failure were identified, and the countermeasures were proposed from the manufacturing point of view. Achievements of this study would provide an actual and vivid example to understand how the processing of polymer matrix composite materials affects the microstructures, the properties and the performances, and would consequently help to prevent similar failures on automotive parts with such materials.