Tailoring Thermal Properties of Hybrid Glass Fibers/Carbon Fibers Reinforced Polymeric Composites

The herein paper tackles the issue of dimensional stability of composite materials from the perspective of characterization the overall linear coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) for different hybrid polymeric composite architectures tailored with the aim of lowering the manufacturing costs and fulfilling few design requirements in several engineering applications. The hybrid configurations are made of unidirectional carbon fibers (max. 1 or 2) embedded along with different combinations of E-glass woven roving or chopped E-glass strand mat as wear/chemical resistant, outside reinforcement layers. A polyester resin type was used as binder. The thermal properties were measured using a differential dilatometer DIL 402 PC/1 from NETZSCH GmbH (Germany) imposing a linear, monotonic temperature rise with 1 K/min from 20°C up to 250°C. Thermal cycling behavior was underlined by imposing two successive heating cycles upon each hybrid composite samples. Thermal strains temperature/time evolution and peak values are further analyzed to size the thermal aging effects. The experimental retrieved data will be further compared with the values obtained by running a micromechanical based approach simulation on the DIGIMAT software (from X-stream Engineering Inc., Luxembourg).