Static and fatigue tensile behaviour of 3D braided carbon/epoxy composite

The present work describes an experimental study dealing with a 3D braided carbon/epoxy composite produced by 3TEX, Inc. The experimental activities involves static tensile tests and tensile-tensile fatigue tests of the composite. The static investigation includes tensile loading up to failure with acoustic emission (AE) registration, full-field surface strain mapping (SM) and damage observation. The aims of the preliminary fatigue study are to obtain the stress level at which damage does not lead to the ultimate failure of the specimen after 5 million cycles and to produce the Wöhler (s-N) curve.