1 ID-1182 AXIAL AND FLEXURAL FATIGUE BEHAVIOR OF WOVEN COMPOSITES Ajit D. Kelkar 1 , Hassan Mahfuz 2 and Shaik Jeelani 2 1 Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures Department of Mechanical Engineering North Carolina A&T State University Greensboro, NC 27411, USA 2 Tuskegee University's Center for Advanced Materials (T-CAM) Tuskegee, AL 36088, USA SUMMARY: Textile composites are materials reinforced by a network of tows and are formed by processes such as weaving, braiding or knitting. Woven fabric composites are a two-dimensional class of textile composites where the warp and fill fiber tows are woven into each other to form a layer. The composite laminate thus formed has good properties in mutually orthogonal directions as well as better out of plane impact resistance than the multidirectional laminate. These woven composites are being considered for several primary structural applications in place of conventional metals. They are being manufactured by using new processes such as Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM). This new process is low cost, affordable and suitable for high volume manufacturing environment. This paper focuses on low cost affordable manufacturing of the popular woven composites using S2-Glass and vinylester C-50 resin system and VARTM process. This paper also presents performance evaluation of these VARTM manufactured thick composite woven laminates under the axial and flexural fatigue loading. Number of tests were performed to evaluate the basic properties such as modulus, ultimate tensile strength, and Poisson's ratio of these woven composites. Axial and flexural fatigue experiments with R ratio of 0.1 were conducted to generate two important curves to characterize the fatigue behavior of this material system: S- N diagram and stiffness degradation over the entire fatigue life of the specimens. KEYWORDS: woven composites, textiles, fatigue, properties, characterization INTRODUCTION Textile composites are materials reinforced by a network of tows and are formed by processes such as weaving, braiding or knitting. Woven fabric composites are a two-dimensional class of textile composites where the warp and fill fiber tows are woven into each other to form a layer. The composite laminate thus formed has good properties in mutually orthogonal directions as well as better out of plane impact resistance than the multidirectional laminate. These woven composites are being considered for several primary structural applications in place of conventional metals. They are being manufactured by using new process such as Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM). This new process is low cost, affordable and suitable for high volume manufacturing environment. Since these woven composites are being evaluated for primary load carrying structural applications, these components are expected to be under fatigue loading. To assess the feasibility of this material manufactured through VARTM process it is very important to understand the fatigue behavior of these composite materials. The structural composites in the real world applications undergo various forms of static and cyclic loading during its life cycle. Cyclic loading of machine structures occurs often in mechanical systems. It is well known that fatigue strength is smaller than static strength due to the degradation of structure due to fatigue cycle. However, fatigue behaviors of composite