Examination of the tensile state of fibers in braided fiber reinforced composite tubes

Abstract

Braided composite rods and tubes offer a special possibility of structures tailored to loading. In this paper the contraction in the cross-section of a braided carbon/epoxy-acrylate tube is modelled and tested during tensile test. For the model the reinforcing fibrous structure was assumed to be located on the middle surface of the tube both before and during deformation. A hyperbolic type function was derived for describing the cross-section which was measured by a videoextensometer. The theory gave a good agreement with the measurements before neck-forming.