The Impact Resistance of Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Composites: A Review

Fiber reinforced composites are widely used instead of traditional materials invarious technological applications. Therefore, by considering the extensiveapplications of these materials, a proper knowledge of their impact behavior(from low- to high-velocity) as well as their static behavior is necessary. In order tostudy the effects of strain rates on the behavior of these materials, special testing machinesare needed. Most of the research efforts in this field are focused on applicationof real loading and gripping boundary conditions on the testing specimens. In this paper,a detailed review of different types of impact testing techniques and the strain ratedependence of mechanical and strength properties of polymer composite materialsare presented. In this respect, an attempt is made to present and summarize the methodsof impact tests and the strain rate effects on the tensile, compressive, shear andbending properties of the fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials. Moreover, aclassification of the state-of-the-art of the testing techniques to characterize compositematerial properties in a wide range of strain rates are also given.