The blast performance of plain composites

An important step towards understanding the blast response of composite materials involves characterising the failure and fracture processes that result from the air-blast loading. A number of workers have investigated the fadure mechanisms in 

In addition, there is also the possibility of tailoring the properties of plain composites further by adding particles (such as metallic fillers [29,30], carbon nanotubes [31] or urea formaldehyde [32]) to the composite layers to create multifunctional and self-healing materials, von Klemperer and Maharaj [29] added copper and aluminium powder fillers to carbon fibre epoxy laminates to improve the electromagnetic shielding capacity of the composite panels. Blast tests on the laminates [30] showed that the laminates with filler particles outperformed their plain composite counterparts, although the margin was small. 

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