A Study on Strength Prediction of Mechanical Joint of Composite under Bending Load

This paper predicted the strength of mechanical joint of composites under bending load by means of the characteristic curve method. The method has been employed only for tensile and compression load conditions, but in this study, this method was extended to the bending load condition. For the finite element analysis (FEA), the non-linear analysis was conducted considering the contact and friction effects between composite material and pin. The failure strength and mode on characteristic curve were evaluate with Tsai-Wu failure theory. To validate the results of FEA, the experiments were conducted to find out the failure load by applying bending moment on the composite specimens. The results showed reasonable agreements with theoretical results. These results lead to a conclusion that the characteristic curve method can be applied to predict the bending strength of mechanical joint of composites.