Experimental monitoring of the self-heating properties of thermoplastic composite materials

The full estimation of the fatigue lifetime of a given material is needed for the industrial structures sizing. However, it requires time-consuming, expensive fatigue testing campaigns and a huge number of samples. An alternative experimental procedure is based on the monitoring of the “self-heating” properties. The aim here is to correlate the fatigue limit with a change of thermal behavior. The main advantage of such tests is that they only require few samples and are constituted of a limited number of mechanical cycles. Thus, self-heating tests lead to an accelerated estimation of the endurance limit. The purpose of the present paper is to validate this approach for carbon/thermoplastic composite materials.