Fibre misalignment measurement of nanomodified-unidirectional carbon fibre laminates

This paper investigates the effect of nanosilica on the fibre waviness or misalignment angle distribution of carbon fibre reinforced polymer composite unidirectional laminates. The quality of the laminates was evaluated using image analyzer technique. The polished specimens were examined using Polyvar B-met optical microscope and analysed using KSRUN ZEISS software. The effect of 3, 7 and 13 vol.% nanosilica on the fibre misalignment angle distribution was determined. The results showed that, the fabricated laminates have average fibre volume fraction Vf of 42%, low fibre waviness distribution (average φo = 2.5o) and less than 1% void content. This implies that the fabrication technique, which was employed in the current work, successfully produced good quality laminates. The presence of nanosilica results in a narrow fibre angle distribution in the HTS40/828 laminate.