Determination of local debonding stress and investigation of its effect on mechanical properties of glass short fiber reinforced polycarbonate composites

Thermoplastic polymers are often reinforced by adding short fibers to improve mechanical properties including Young's modulus and tensile strength of the polymers. In many engineering applications, energy absorbing characteristics in such particulate polymers is known to be a very important property to be considered in composite designs, and meanwhile debonding at the interface between fiber and matrix in the composites may affect the energy absorption properties. Here, the focus of this study is to employ a semi-empirical approach to determine the debonding stress and investigate the effect of the debonding stress on energy absorbing properties of short glass fiber reinforced polycarbonate composites. Glass short fiber reinforced polycarbonate composites are fabricated via a solution mixing technique. Tensile testing and acoustic emission measurement are simultaneously performed for the polycarbonate composites. The test results including toughness are compared for the composites over neat polycarbonate. Also the local debonding stress in the vicinity of each glass fiber in composites is estimated by combining modeling and experiments. A finite element model is developed to determine local debonding stress at the interface between the fiber and matrix. The local debonding stress appears to considerably affect the toughness of the composites.