A Re-examination of DMA Testing of Polymer Matrix Composites

Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) is one of the most powerful tools to study the behavior of plastic and polymer composite materials. Unfortunately, as observed in literature and from author's experiences, there are discrepancies in the measurement of storage modulus using DMA, particularly for high modulus materials like carbon fiber composites. This is because of lack of guidelines for DMA testing of materials. This paper systematically studied the DMA testing of composites for both rectangular and cylindrical beam type specimens, identified the problems, made corrections and established simple test guidelines. Using these guidelines a wide variety of materials were tested and the test