Evaluation of interlaminar shear strength of co-cured fiber-reinforced fabric composite structures by lap joint method

Interlaminar shear strength (ILSS) indicates the resistance to interlaminar delamination of fiber-reinforced composite structures. The short beam shear (SBS) method has been commonly used for ILSS measurement, but unwanted failure modes can appear like a compressive or tensile failure in surface, and diagonal shear failure, causing poor measurement accuracy. The lap joint method has advantage that leading to a clear measurement of the shear strength. This paper proposed the lap joint method for extracting ILSS values of co-cured carbon or glass fiber-reinforced fabric composites (CFRC or GFRC) by minimizing the discrepancy between the experiment and finite element analysis of ILSS test. The lap joint method can compensate for the shortcomings of the SBS method. The calculated ILSS based on the lap joint method (LJ-ILSS) with correction factors showed similar values to the ILSS values by SBS method (SBS-ILSS) done by our work and other works of literature. Therefore, the proposed lap joint method has shown potential as a method to measure ILSS of the co-cured fiber-reinforced fabric composites, but also it can be extended to other types of fiber-reinforced composites.