Impact Toughness and Fractographic Peculiarities of a Composite Pump Rod Fracture

The impact toughness of each component (fibreglass shell and carbon-plastic core) of the composite pump rod was evaluated, and the fractographic peculiarities of the impact-tested samples fracture were investigated. The fibres inside the rod shell are fractured by a brittle cleavage mechanism and the polymer matrix by a ductile mechanism, with its failure into small fragments. A specific feature of the rod core is strips of unidirectional carbon fibres with periodic reorientation, with the change of crack propagation direction at the transitions between adjacent strips. This structurally conditioned reorientation of the fracture surface inside the rod core retarded the fracture of both the core material and the rod as a whole.