Effect of incorporating aluminum wire mesh on the notched and un-notched strengths of glass fiber/epoxy composites

The fiber/metal composite technology consolidates the usefulness of metallic materials and fiber reinforced matrix systems. Glass laminate aluminum reinforced epoxy is a hybrid composite containing alternative thin layer of Aluminum (Al) plies and fiber reinforced epoxy. However, the low adhesion between Al thin layer and epoxy limits their application. In this work, we used Al wire meshes to toughen the neat E-glass fiber/epoxy composite. Un-notched and notched tensile and flexural tests were conducted to study the effect of incorporating Al wire meshes at different locations within the specimen thickness instead of the glass fiber plies on the mechanical properties of the produced materials. The results indicated that, incorporating Al mesh as a replacement of glass fibers could tailor the laminates strength, ductility and toughness. As the number of Al mesh layers increased, the specific tensile and flexural strengths decreased. The through-the-thickness position and orientation of Al mesh layer significantly affected the properties of the produced hybrid laminates. The presence of Al mesh at the outer layers highly reduced the tensile and flexural strengths. However, it improved the tensile and flexural strains and reaching an improvement of 54% and 117%, respectively. The energy absorption ability under tensile and flexural tests was highly improved with the addition of Al mesh layers reaching a maximum improvement of 210% and 166%, respectively. The mode I fracture toughness characterized by notched bending test was improved by 25.7% for samples with Al mesh layer replacing the third and sixth glass fiber layers.