GLARE (GLAss REinforced aluminium laminate) is a hybrid composite material composed of alternating layers of aluminium and glass fiber, offering distinct advantages over traditional aluminium alloys. These benefits include superior fatigue performance, a high strength-to-weight ratio, high corrosion resistance, and improved impact tolerance.

For any aircraft to be certified, it must meet crashworthiness standards, ensuring that it can absorb impact energy while maintaining acceptable deceleration levels. However, unconventional aircraft designs, such as the Flying-V, which integrate the wing and fuselage structures to improve fuel efficiency, present unique challenges for crashworthiness. In these designs, the integration of fuselage with the wing, results in an oval shaped fuselage which reduces the stroke length between the passenger floor and the ground. Due to their exceptional mechanical properties, GLARE laminates offer a promising solution for enhancing the crashworthiness of such designs. This work investigates the energy absorption characteristics of GLARE laminates under bending, a key failure mechanism in crash scenarios.

A total of 452 samples consisting of five different types of GLARE (2A, 2B, 3, 4A and 4B) with varying number of layers, orientation and aluminium layer thicknesses were tested at 4 different strain rates (1 mm/min,10 mm/min, 100 mm/min, and 1000 mm/min). The experimental results identified five distinct failure mechanisms through which GLARE laminates fail under bending loads. The effects of strain rate, rolling direction, stacking sequence and orientation were further analyzed.