Practical Results to the Long Term Behaviour of Fibre Reinforced Polymers under Constant Load

The long term behaviour of fibre reinforced polymers is important for many uses. In this publication experiments are described in which three different carbon fibre epoxy compound specimens, with different fibre orientations, are compared. For a comparison to metallic materials, as well as to get a benchmark, steel and aluminium specimens are also tested. All specimens are loaded with constant loads; the investigated load types are bending and torsion. In the experiments two different scenarios are investigated. The first scenario compares the creep behaviour under uniform start deflections and the second scenario compares the creep behaviour under uniform load conditions.