Segmentation Tools for Delineating the Profiles of Pulled-out Fibre Bundles in In-Situ Tomograms of Translaminar Fracture of Thin-Ply Composites
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The translaminar fracture toughness of a fibre-reinforced composite reflects its damage tolerance under longitudinal tension. Fibre pull-out process is one of the main energy-dissipation contributors to translaminar toughness. Our previous work [1] proposed and successfully tested a downscaled compact tension specimen for translaminar fracture analysis of thin-ply composites. The in-situ experiments, conducted at TOMCAT beamline of the Swiss Light Source (Paul Scherrer Institut), are followed by reconstruction of tomographic volumes. The U-net convolutional neural network in Dragonfly software is employed for semantic segmentation. For the first time, the in-situ pulled-out bundle profiles (see Fig. 1), their maximum height and the interrelationship with the associated translaminar fracture toughness are analysed per lay-up configuration. Finally, the effect of fibre-by-fibre hybridisation and/or ply-blocking in altering the fracture toughness, is assessed.