Improvement in fatigue life of carbon fibre reinforced polymer composites via a Nano-Silica Modified Matrix

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites are increasingly the material of choice in a variety of high performance structural applications including the aerospace, defense, wind energy and automotive industries. A key limitation of these materials is their poor fatigue life induced by initiation and growth of small-scale cracks in the epoxy matrix. Here, we show that incorporation of nano-silica into the epoxy resin results in nano-modified CFRP (nanoCFRP) with 6-7 fold higher fatigue life in the high cycle fatigue regime. The mechanism for the observed performance improvement is the ability of the nano-silica to disrupt and prolong the propagation process of incipient cracks. This in turn postpones the eventual failure of the CFRP, leading to fatigue life increase. The ability to achieve such results with silica nanoparticles has strong practical implications, since nano-silica are easily accessible and economically inexpensive for large-scale industrial applications. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.