Étude expérimentale de l’endommagement d’un composite tissé mince sous traction quasi-statique via thermographie infrarouge

International audience; This work deals with the issue of damage growth in thin glass/epoxy woven composite subjected to quasi-static tensile loading. For such loading, intralaminar transverse weft cracking represents the main damage mode and are undetectable with conventional non-destructive technics using X-rays or ultrasounds. In this context, test monitoring with infrared thermography enabled both to detect heat rise associated with weft yarn cracking and to estimate the quantity of loose heat. Damage cartographies characterizing the temporal and the spatial evolution of transverse crackings have then been obtained, and combined with microscopic observations enabled us to assess the damage sequence up to failure. Afterwards, from the measure of the energy dissipated as heat, a method was proposed to estimate the critical energy release rate associated with intralaminar cracking for glass/epoxy woven composites. Finally, the order of magnitude of the results obtained is compared to those observed in the literature about the intralaminar cracking of unidirectional composites.