Composite kink-band formation imaged in realtime under axial compression

Carbon-fibre-reinforced plastics (CFRPs) are critical materials in the move to Net Zero for their unique high stiffness and tensile strength-to-weight ratio. However, their Achilles’ heel is their poor compressive strength due to premature failure by kinking. Kink bands forms suddenly and catastrophically, and it is known that fibre waviness/misalignment is key to its early onset. Catastrophic kink-band initiation is known to form in less than 0.2 ms1, requiring extremely fast in situ X-ray imaging, to resolve the event with the necessary high spatial resolution. Here, we propose to combine ID19’s high flux with our in situ ten-sion-compression rig to perform fast synchrotron radiography at > 100 kHz to understand the mechanism of kink banding during CFRPs compressive failure and how the carbon fibre microstructure im-pacts/triggers the kink bands for the first time.