Thermosetting polymers are widely used as matrix material for high performance lightweight structures made of fibre-reinforced polymers (FRP). During processing, material-inherent properties, like resin shrinkage, cure-dependent viscoelasticity and anisotropy of the composite provoke the build-up of residual stresses that may lead to micro-cracks and reduced lifetime. In order to improve understanding for the complex interaction of manufacturing and laminate properties, process simulation has established as essential tool in both scientific and industrial environment. For this purpose, usually multi-scale approaches are adopted that combine a range of material input data with different homogenisation steps. While the neat resin is often thoroughly analysed in dependence on the process parameters like time, temperature and cure, the resulting composite behaviour is often only validated on macroscopic scale. As a consequence, the microscopic contribution of the fibre-matrix-interface to the effective composite properties during cure remains an unknown variable. Until the present, only few data regarding the influence of process relevant parameters like cure and temperature on fibre-matrix-interaction is available.
For this reason, we suggest a novel microscale experiment, which is dedicated to the in-situ analysis of the cure-dependent fibre-matrix-interaction. It is inspired by the previous work of BRODOWSKY et al. which was performed to assess microscopic fatigue effects of single fibre model composites. Based on the selection of a model resin material, basic characterisation by rheological and calorimetric experiments is performed. First experimental results of the novel test setup are presented that highlight the impact of matrix viscoelasticity and cure on the interface behaviour.