Scanning electron microscopy datasets for local fibre volume fraction determination in non-crimp glass-fibre reinforced composites

The fatigue damage evolution depends on the local fiber volume fraction as observed in the co-submitted publication [1]. Conventionally, fiber volume fractions are determined as an averaged overall fiber volume fraction determined from small cuts of the laminate. Alternatively, automatically stitching of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images can make high-resolution scans of large cross-section area with large contrast between the polymer and glass-fiber phase.

Therefore, local distribution of the fiber volume fraction can be characterized automatically using such scan-data. The two datasets presented here cover two large Field of Views scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. The two images is generated from between 1200 to 1800 high-resolution scan pictures which have been stitched into two high-resolution tif-files.

The resolution corresponds to between 700-5000 pixels covering each fibre. The datasets are coming from two different non-crimp fabric glass fibre reinforced epoxy composites typically used in the wind turbine industry. Depending on the regions analyzed, fibre volume fraction in the range of 50-85% is found.

The maximum local fibre volume fraction is found averaging the local fibre volume fraction over 5 × 5 fibre diameter (80 × 80 µm2) areas. The local fibre volume fraction has been used in the analysis performed in [1].