Investigating the translaminar fracture toughness of 3D printed semi-woven and non-woven continuous carbon fibre composites

The translaminar fracture toughness of two different continuous fibre 3D printed ply architectures was evaluated using compact tension (CT) test specimens. A baseline 0/90 cross-ply architecture was characterised and compared to the performance of a semi-woven 0/90 ply architecture that is similar in concept to Advanced Placed Ply (AP-Ply) fabricated using automated fibre placement. The experimental results show that the trans-laminar fracture toughness of 3D printed carbon fibre composites is slightly influenced by the laminate archi-tecture. Both ply architectures exhibited a rising R curve which was less pronounced in the semi-woven samples. This study demonstrates that tailoring the meso structure of a fibre reinforced composite has a minor influence on the translaminar properties and lays the groundwork for ply scale optimisation to fully exploit the manufacturing flexibility of 3D printed continuous fibre composites.