Hybrid Composites for Engineering Application

Composite Materials have extensive engineering application where strength to weight ratio, low cost and ease of fabrication are required. Hybrid composites provide combination of properties such as tensile modulus, compressive strength and impact strength which cannot be realized in composite materials. Results presented in this paper relate to the development of glass, kevlar49 and carbon woven fibres (WF) reinforced polyester and epoxy based hybrid composites. In our study, a range of composites containing various volume fractions of woven fabric were manufactured by hand lay-up technique and tested mechanically. The results have shown linear inear increase in tensile strength with an increase in volume fraction fabric for both polyester and epoxy based composites. Hybrid composites have shown up to more than 100% increase in modulus of polyester composites while glass fabric reinforced polyester composites showed high tensile properties.