Thermal Anisotropy
The difference between the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of the fiber and resin causes residual stresses on both micro and macro scale; however, this does not cause any distortion on the macro scale [4]. The CTE of the fibers is much smaller than that of the resin. This mismatch is resulting in the thermal anisotropy on the macro scale because the part expands or contracts more in the resin dominated direction as compared to the fiber dominated direction. A balanced symmetric flat part does not have any out of plane distortion if there is no tooling constraint.
However, the CTE difference between the thickness direction and the circumferential direction results in a reduction in the enclosed angle of the part for curved regions which is known as spring-in. In the case of isotropic materials, the contraction upon cooling in a curved region is uniform, and therefore the angle is preserved. The CTE and strains in the through-thickness direction are much higher than the CTE and stains in the fiber direction for fiber reinforced composites. To illustrate, this leads to a reduction in the enclosed angle (h) as shown in Fig. 1 in which the effect is reversible, i.e., the spring-in angle reduces if the part is reheated.
The first attempt to calculate the magnitude of the enclosed angle was proposed by Nelson and Cairns [9] with the following Eq. 1: