Hybrid composites with aligned discontinuous fibres

High performance composites can replace metals in many applications because of their exceptional strength and light weight, but brittle failure is an undesirable characteristic. Hybridisation is one of the approaches to overcome this limitation of composites because hybrid composites provide the potential for tailoring a response with desired stiffness, strength and ductility. In this paper, hybrid composites consisting of unidirectional continuous glass laminates and aligned discontinuous carbon preforms developed by the HiPerDiF (High Performance Discontinuous Fibre) method were tested in tension. The hybrid composite is designed as a layer-by-layer system to achieve pseudo-ductile response. Results are presented showing the effects of the proportion and absolute thickness of the aligned carbon preform on the failure modes. This paper also introduces the advantages of the aligned discontinuous carbon preforms produced by the HiPerDiF method in layer-by-layer hybrid composites.