Fundamentals of Fibre Reinforced Composite Materials

Fibre reinforced composite materials are showing sustained growth in an ever widening range of applications from food trays to spacecraft as well as contributing to resolving environmental problems, including enabling the forthcoming hydrogen economy to be realised. This second edition of Fundamentals of Fibre Reinforced Composite Materials has been fully updated throughout, providing an authoritative and modern introduction to the topic with a brief history of composite development, a review of composite applications, manufacture and markets, types of fibres and matrices used, and their properties with a detailed introduction into the computer simulation of composite behaviour. With extensive sets of sample problems accompanying each chapter, this book is ideally suited to undergraduate and graduate students of materials science, structural, mechanical, and aeronautical engineering, polymer science, metallurgy, and other courses. It will also be of use as a reference to researchers and engineers working with composite materials and material scientists in general.

Features:

• Presents thorough discussions on composite history, composite applications and markets, types of fibres and resins used, and their respective properties

• Relates mathematical concepts to the structure of the material under discussion leading to the quantitative evaluation of safety factors

• Provides numerous sets of sample problems in each chapter

Anthony R.Bunsell was born and educated in England. He has worked both in industrial and academic research both in the UK and France. He has been responsible for research in the fields of fibre reinforcements and fibre reinforced composites at the Ecole des Mines de Paris (now Mines ParisTech, PSL University) since 1975. He was a founding member of the French composite society (AMAC), president of the International Conference on Composite Materials from 1980 to 1982, elected as a World Fellow for the International Committee on Composite Materials and has received other awards for his contributions to composite research. He has lectured and worked widely on composites on five continents and has published many scientific articles on fibres and composites as well as many books on those subjects and on material science in general.

Dr. Sébastien Joannès is a Research Scientist at the Materials Centre of Mines-ParisTech, PSL University. He has contributed to the field of Polymer and Composite materials science since 2011. His scientific projects focus around durability and modelling strategies to account to account for the damage accumulation during in-service conditions of composite structures. He has more than twenty years of experience of this topic and his recent activities have been dedicated to fibre strength and matrix behaviour characterisation to be used as stochastic variable in multi-scale modelling. His research is carried out in partnership with industrial leaders in the transport and energy sectors. He is in charge of the fibre laboratory at the Materials Centre and as such, develops, with his colleagues new tools and methods dedicated to single fibre characterisation.

Alain Thionnet is a University Professor with responsibility for courses on General Mechanics and the Mechanics of Continua at the University of Bourgogne (Burgundy) and also teaches the same subjects at Mines-ParisTech, PSL University where, since 1994, he is a Scientific Advisor to the Materials Centre. His expertise focuses on the behaviour and modelling of composite materials using multi-scale approaches and invariant theories. For nearly twenty years he has develop, with Prof. A.R.Bunsell a life prediction model for carbon fibre reinforced composite structures. He is the author of numerous scientific papers on these subjects.