MODELING OF THE ELASTIC PROPERTIES OF FIBER REINFORCED COMPOSITES .1. ORIENTATION MEASUREMENT

This paper describes the measurement of fibre orientation by means of a transputer-controlled image analysis system developed in house. The image analyser works directly from a polished section, and by employing transputers it can rapidly and accurately measure the orientation parameters of a large number of fibre images. The two composite materials used throughout this study were both well-aligned, one being a continuous carbon-fibre reinforced epoxy resin while the second was a novel short-carbon-fibre reinforced epoxy composite. Orientation distributions have been measured for both materials and this allowed various factors that affect the experimental accuracy of the orientation measurement of the distributions to be examined. These included the effects of fibre shape, sample orientation and manufacturing procedure.