Co-authors​ :

 Dongze HE (UNITED KINGDOM), Léonard TURPIN (UNITED KINGDOM), Jiaqi XU (UNITED KINGDOM), Sangeethsivan SIVAKUMAR , Zihan SONG (UNITED KINGDOM), Thomas ZILLHARDT , Prasad POTLURI , Philip WITHERS (UNITED KINGDOM) 

Braided composite tubes, especially carbon fibre-reinforced polymer (CFRP) braided tubes [1], are gaining increasing industrial interest due to their exceptional specific strength and versatile design flexibility. It helps CFRP braided tubes work well as an effective replacement for conventional metal or polymer tubes in various functional and structural components, especially those rotating or under significant torsion. Therefore, understanding the damage mechanism, initiation and propagation, is of great importance for preventing their unexpected failure. Multilayer braided tubes, compared with single-layer braided tubes [2, 3], possess a more comprehensive range of applications, therefore this work presents the first real-time three-dimensional imaging of damage behaviour/sequence under torsion of multilayer braided tubes. The damage mechanism of three kinds of samples is investigated by in-situ X-ray computed tomography (CT) [4, 5] namely, a) two-layer structure with a 1/1 45° braiding architecture; b) three-layer structure with 1/1 45° braiding architecture; c) two-layer structure with 1/1 60° braiding architecture. This work presents the damage sequence (initiation and propagation) of braided tubes with different manufacturing architectures and also delineates the influence of braiding layers' number and angles on the mechanical performance of 2D braided tubes, providing clear guidance for the following design and geometry optimization of CFRP braided architectures.