Developement of highly oriented Test-Specimens made of short glass fiber reinforced Plastics

Injection molded polybutylene terephthalate reinforced with 30 weight percentage of short glass fibers is a commonly used material in technical applications, e.g. automotive parts. This paper proposes a novel molded plate design for material characterization in order to get explicit material data for structural simulations. It has the advantage, that the short glass fibers are unidirectionally orientated in the testing area. This work furthermore investigates the influence of rough surfaces generated by the milling of specimens for mechanical tests. In the study a correlation between the roughness of the specimens' surface and the fracture strain could not be verified. Further investigations with a larger amount of specimens per parameter set are planned.