The influence of a modest thermal insult from a fire on glass-reinforced thermoplastics is explored experimentally and analytically. A first-order thermomechanical model was formulated to investigate the thermomechanical response of asymmetrically heated glass-reinforced, thermo plastic composites under tensile load. Failure predictions can be summarized with a three- dimensional failure surface comprised of load, heatflux and time-to-failure for composite material systems exposed to localized overheating. This paper provides an overview of the preliminary results from a series of small-scale experiments and application of a thermomechanical model.
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