INVESTIGATION OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF BIDIRECTIONAL CARBON / GLASS REINFORCED EPOXY HYBRID COMPOSITES

Now a day the demand for composite products is increasing, ranging from utilitarian underground pipes to high-performance aircraft. Carbon fiber is significantly more expensive than glass fiber, so it is mainly used for highperformance applications where weight saving requirements is critical such as in aircrafts, electric and sports cars, and wind turbine blades, which are getting increasingly longer. Glass fiber has been used in thousands of applications and has thus demonstrated an excellent track history. Glass fibers alone have very less Young's modulus, shear modulus, flexural strength and because of this disadvantage this material is not recommended for many works in aircrafts. This draws attention on the development of hybrid composites in which glass and carbon fibers are laid up in different orientations. Hybrid composites are expected to have good mechanical properties like pure carbon composites and will replace carbon composites in many applications because of their low cost compared to carbon composites. In this paper, we fabricated pure carbon composite plate having orientations 450, 900 and hybrid composite plate (carbon and glass fiber) having orientations 450, 900. Specimens are cut from these plates to test tensile, flexural and shear strengths