Carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRPs) enable lightweight, strong, and durable structures for many engineering applications including aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and others. High-modulus (HM) CFRPs enable the most significant improvement in mechanical stiffness at a lower weight, allowing for extremely lightweight aircraft structures. However, low fiber-direction compressive strength has been a major weakness of HM CFRPs, prohibiting their implementation in the primary structures. Microstructural tailoring may provide an innovative means for breaking through the fiber-direction compressive strength barrier. This has been implemented by hybridizing intermediate-modulus (IM) and HM carbon fibers in HM CFRP toughened with nanosilica particles. The new material solution almost doubles the compressive strength of the HM CFRPs, achieving that of the advanced IM CFRPs currently used in airframes and rotor components, but with a much higher axial modulus. The major focus of this work has been understanding the fiber–matrix interface properties governing the fiber-direction compressive strength improvement of the hybrid HM CFRPs. In particular, differences in the surface topology may cause much higher interface friction for IM carbon fibers compared to the HM fibers, which is responsible for the interface strength improvement. In situ Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)-based experiments were developed to measure interface friction. Such experiments reveal an approximately 48% higher maximum shear traction due to interface friction for IM carbon fibers compared to the HM fibers.

Microscale residual stress may develop during the manufacturing of Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) composites and negatively affect apparent macroscale mechanical properties. Accordingly, accurately capturing residual stress may be essential in computational methods used for composite material design. This work presents a new data-driven methodology for the evaluation of microscale residual stress in CFRPs using fiber push-out experiments with in situ scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging. SEM images reveal significant through-thickness matrix sink-in deformation in resin-rich areas after nearby fibers are pushed out, which is attributed to the release of microscale process-induced residual stress. The sink-in deformation is measured experimentally, and a Finite Element Model Updating (FEMU) method is used to retrieve the associated residual stress. The finite element (FE) analysis includes simulation of the curing process, test sample machining, and fiber push-out experiment. Significant out-of-plane matrix deformation larger than 1% of the specimen thickness is reported and associated with a high level of residual stress in resin-rich areas. This work emphasizes the importance of in situ data-driven characterization for integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) and material design.