Manufacture of short-fibre reinforced glasses by extrusion and examinations regarding their structure and their mechanical properties

Abstract

Technical applications of glasses are mainly limited by their well-known tendency to brittle fracture. One promising possibility to improve the mechanical properties of glasses is the embedding of high-strength reinforcement fibres for increasing the strength and, first of all, the fracture toughness of these materials. Therefore, new fields of application for these glasses can be developed, where their many favourable properties become effective. In this paper the manufacture - by extrusion - of short-fibre reinforced glasses as well as structural and mechanical examinations of the thus produced specimens are represented. Due to the manufacturing process, extrusion results in a nearly unidirectional orientation of the fibres, parallel to the axis of the rod, with a corresponding high degree of reinforcement. After the explanation of the theoretical fundamentals of short-fibre reinforcement of brittle materials, the properties of the materials used for the experiments and the manufacture of the composites are described in detail. The subsequently illustrated examinations have clearly shown improvements of the mechanical properties of the glasses as well as good accordance with the theoretical considerations.