Experimental study of the size effect on transverse cracking in cross-ply laminates and comparison with the main theoretical models

Abstract Transverse cracking of off-axis plies is typically the first step of some failure mechanisms in long fiber reinforced laminated composites. It is well known that the off-axis ply thickness affects strongly the strain level which this ply is able to withstand without cracking. Experimental evidences show that this critical strain level increases strongly with decreasing ply thickness for the thinnest plies, confirming a clear size effect. This fact could be used to inhibit transverse cracking with the use of the recently developed ultra-thin plies. However the classical failure criteria for composites are not able to predict this size effect. From the first tests in the 1970s, several models with very different hypotheses were proposed to predict this size effect. Surprisingly there is still not a clear consensus in the scientific community about which is the adequate model, though their fundamentals are radically different. In this work an extensive test campaign is carried out on self-similar [ 0 / 90 ] s cross-ply laminates of AS4/8552 carbon/epoxy. The size effect is evaluated spanning a broader spectrum of thicknesses than in the tests presented in the literature until now, in order to explore the range of thicknesses where the differences between predictions of the main theoretical models are larger. In spite of the inherent dispersion in the experimental results, the comparison shows that the purely stress-based criteria underestimates the apparent strength of the off-axis ply. The other models predict very similar results, particularly for the thinnest laminates, with slight underestimations or overestimations, depending on the model.