MECHANICAL TESTING

Flexural Properties of Fiber Reinforced Ceramic Composites - ASTM C 1341

"Standard Test Method for Flexural Properties of Continuous Fiber-Reinforced Advanced Ceramic Composites" ASTM C 1341
ASTM C1341 covers the determination of the flexural properties of continuous fiber-reinforced ceramic composites in the form of rectangular bars formed directly or cut from sheets, plates, or molded shapes.

This test method is used for material development, quality control, and material flexural specifications. Although flexural test methods are commonly used to determine design strengths of monolithic advanced ceramics, the use of flexure test data for determining tensile or compressive properties of CFCC materials is strongly discouraged. The non-uniform stress distributions in the flexure specimen, the dissimilar mechanical behavior in tension and compression for CFCC's, low shear strength of CFCC's, and anisotropy in fiber architecture all lead to ambiguity in using flexure results for CFCC material design data. Rather, uniaxial-loaded tensile and compressive tests are recommended for developing CFCC material design data based on a uniformly stressed test condition.

Flexure tests provide information on the strength and deformation of materials under complex flexural stress conditions. In CFCC's nonlinear stress-strain behavior may develop as the result of cumulative damage processes ­ for example, matrix cracking, matrix/fiber debonding, fiber fracture, delamination This may be influenced by testing mode, testing rate, processing effects, or environmental influences. Some of these effects may be consequences of stress corrosion or subcritical (slow) crack growth which can be minimized by testing at sufficiently rapid rates.

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