Micromechanical parameters from macromechanical measurements on glass reinforced polyamide 6,6

Many elegant techniques have been developed for the quantification of compo site micromechanical parameters in recent years. Unfortunately most of thes e techniques have found little enthusiastic support in the industrial produ ct development environment. We have developed an improved method for obtain ing the micromechanical parameters, interfacial shear strength, fibre orien tation factor, and fibre stress at composite failure using input data from macromechanical tests. In this paper we explore this method through its app lication to injection moulded glass-fibre-reinforced thermoplastic composit es. We have measured the mechanical properties and residual fibre length di stributions of glass fibre reinforced polyamide 6,6 containing different le vels of glass fibre. These data were used as input for the model. The trend s observed for the resultant micromechanical parameters obtained by this me thod were in good agreement with values obtained by other methods. Given th e wealth of microstructural information obtained from this macroscopic anal ysis and the low level of resources employed to obtain the data we believe that this method deserves further investigation as a screening tool in comp osite system development programmes. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rig hts reserved.