In the present work fracture characterization of the glass filled epoxy material has been carried out. Such materials possess excellent ultimate, impact and fracture strength. Typical applications of this material are automobile body panels, bumpers, seats, and boat hulls, circuit boards.
Experiments have been performed in two parts. In the first part, a tensile test has been carried out as per ISO-527/ASTM D638 standard to determine the Young's modulus of the material. Specimens have been prepared along and across fiber orientation to find out the orthotropic properties of material.
In the second part of the experiment, a fracture test has been performed using compact tension specimens in both along and across of fiber orientations to compute the fracture parameters of the material. ASTM D5045 and ASTM E1820 have been used as guidelines for experimental setup and fracture parameters calculation.
A similar fracture test has been simulated in ANSYS with experimental results as input/reference. The analysis output of fracture parameters has been verified to correlate with experiment results. Applicability of such ANSYS results is currently limited to isotropic materials only. Displacement extrapolation method and virtual crack extension method has been used to suggest guidelines to enhance the applicability of simulation result for orthotropic materials.
Use of the above guidelines has been demonstrated on Compact Tension (CT) specimen and auto components for pass-fail recommendation.