Multilayer Stick–Slip Micromechanics Revealing Interlayer Friction‐Induced Damping Enhancement in HNT ‐Incorporated CFRP Composites

ABSTRACT Carbon fiber‐reinforced polymers (CFRPs) generally exhibit insufficient intrinsic damping despite their excellent stiffness‐to‐weight performance, limiting their application in vibration‐sensitive structures. Halloysite nanotubes (HNT) possess a concentric multilayer tubular architecture, where potential interlayer sliding provides additional frictional dissipation pathways without substantially increasing the filler volume fraction. A multilayer stick–slip framework is developed, in which each wall layer is treated as an independent Cox‐type shear‐lag element with a local critical shear stress, and the accumulated frictional work is integrated to obtain the matrix loss factor. Experimentally, HNT‐incorporated woven CFRP laminates were fabricated by vacuum‐assisted resin transfer molding (VaRTM) with HNT loadings of 0.5 and 1.0 wt% and characterized by dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) in three‐point bending mode. The storage modulus at 30°C increases from 37.26 GPa for neat CFRP to 55.94 and 70.65 GPa at 0.5 and 1.0 wt% HNT, respectively, while the peak loss factor increases concurrently from 0.407 to 0.417 and 0.432, accompanied by an increase in glass‐transition temperature of up to 3.3°C. Computationally, the model captures the observed damping trends and provides a self‐consistent effective matrix modulus for the stick–slip calculation. Parametric analyses reveal the coupled effects of interfacial strength, multilayer architecture, tube geometry, and matrix properties in governing slip‐induced damping.