Design of Mechanical Impact tests equivalent to lightning strikes

F. Soulas (1) , Christine Espinosa (1) , Frederic Lachaud (1) , Y. Duval , S. Guinard , Bruno Lepetit , I. Revel

1 ICA - Institut Clément Ader

Lightning strikes of composite materials induce two distinct kinds of direct effects: surface and bulk mechanical damage. Bulk damage includes fiber-resin debonding, transverse cracks, fiber rupture and ply delamination. It results from the mechanical stress associated to physical processes which come with lightning strikes such as surface explosion or magnetic force generation. We propose a method to design mechanical impact tests representative of lightning tests in the sense that strain and stress applied to the material in both experimental situations are comparable. Then we compute the deflections of the samples expected for these representative impacts and we compare them with the ones measured during lightning tests.

Domaines: Mécanique des matériaux [physics.class-ph]

F. Soulas, Christine Espinosa, Frederic Lachaud, Y. Duval, S. Guinard, et al.. Design of Mechanical Impact tests equivalent to lightning strikes. ECCM16 - 16TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON COMPOSITE MATERIALS, Seville, Spain, 22-26 June 2014, 2014, Seville, Spain. ⟨hal-02054261⟩