A STATISTICAL FATIGUE DAMAGE ANALYSIS OF UNIDIRECTIONAL COMPOSITES

Fatigue involves damage accumulated gradually in time when loads are a pplied repeatedly. Assessment of the material degradation process shou ld make reference to the physical size of damage and/or mode of failur e. Nonuniform damage in location and time makes the behavior inhomogen eous. Developed in this work is a statistical fatigue damage model suc h that effects at the microscopic and macroscopic scale level could be accounted for. The reliability function agreed well with the bending fatigue data for a unidirectional E glass/epoxy composite.