Investigation of the Damage Behavior of Steel/CF Hybrid by Pure Bending Test

To address the increasing demand for lightweight and high-performance materials, metal/carbon fiber hybrid laminates that contain a metal sheet substrate laminated with a layer of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) have been developed. Recent work has identified roll forming as a potential high volume manufacturing process for such carbon fiber reinforced metal hybrid (CFRMH) components [1]. However, some forming issues including fiber buckling and kinking have been observed that may influence component performance in application. The major deformation mode in roll forming is simple bending. This work investigates the formability and related failure modes of a steel/CF hybrid with different layup sequences in bending deformation. For this pure bending tests are performed followed by damage behavior analysis with microscope observation. A finite element (FE) model is developed and achieved a good agreement with the experimental results. The results suggest that the formability and bending strength of steel/CF are a function of the fiber orientation. The FEA model accurately reflects the main trends but underestimates the bending strength of some fiber orientation conditions.