Effect of Expert and Non-expert Workers’ Skill Level on the Quality of Glass Fiber Reinforced Composites by Hand Lay-Up Method

Glass fiber is well known as a reinforced material with low costs and excellent mechanical properties advantages and it has been extensively exploited over the past few years. In this paper, glass fiber was selected and used to fabricate composite with unsaturated polyester resin by hand lay-up method. However, the issue that it is difficulty for quality of product to control was caused by this method. At recent research, the effect of the worker’s skill levels on the quality of product has hardly been investigated. Therefore, it mainly focuses on worker’s skill level influence on the mechanical performance of molded product in this paper. To achieve this purpose, Subjects (Subject A, B, C, D, E had 25, 18, 15, 4, 1 year of experience, respectively.) were allowed to choose their familiar molding tools to produce product which were made of the same materials and met the requirements of volume friction. The thickness of laminates was measured especially in the corner before the test. In addition, bending properties and low cycle bending fatigue (LCBF) were also discussed and investigated. After the test, the fracture cross sectional observations was implemented on the selected test specimens by using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), with a focus on the fracture morphologies.