Analysis of Recoil Compressive Failure in High Performance Polymers Using Two and Four Parameter Weibull Models

Abstract

In this study, large amounts of recoil compressive failure data were gathered for Kevlar-29 fibers. Once the dependence of failure frequency on stress level had been determined experimentally, two-parameter and four-parameter Weibull models were used to represent the data. An analysis of these results shows that each model represents the failure well, but that the four-parameter model offers little improvement over the two-parameter Weibull model. Deconstruction of the four-parameter model indicated that a single failure mechanism dominated and that this mechanism could be well represented by the two-parameter Weibull model. These results imply that while recoil compressive failure is more complicated than tensile failure, recoil failure is dominated by a single flaw distribution and can be represented by a more simple model than tensile failure.