Effects of Absorbed Moisture Content on the Impact Response of Specially-Orthotropic Composite Plates

This paper addresses the hygroscopic effects on the impact response of specially-orthotropic carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite plates under low-velocity impact loading. The material used in this study is Toray T800/3900 which is consist of carbon fibers and epoxy resin. For different percentage of moisture content by weight in the composite plates, low-velocity impact tests were done by using the 8-ply unidirectional [UD] and cross-ply [CP] composite plates with newly designed mini-drop tower testing machine. To study the hygroscopic effects, specimens were impacted by constant weight of impactor (3.44 Kg) with fixed impact height of 0.70 m corresponding to 23.62 J impact energy. The experiments were carried out on plates with dimension of 125 mm × 125 mm × 1.5 mm for simply supported boundary conditions. All UD composite plates were broken into two parts, but the impactor bounces back after hitting the top layer of the CP composite plate for all conditions. The strength of the UD composite plates decreased with increase of moisture contents, but with the increased of moisture contents, a small change was observed in the peak force, time to peak force values and absorbed energy for the CP composite plates. The large size damage areas were observed for wet plates as compared to dry plates. Absorbed moisture contents also have effect on the impactor velocity and impactor displacement.