The introduction of carbon-fibre reinforced plastics in load bearing automotive structures provides a great potential to reduce vehicle weight and fuel consumption. A reduction in overall manufacturing cost can be realised through part integration and use of cost-effective materials such as heavy tow carbon fibre. There is a current drive within the automotive industry to develop the technologi...

In drilling of composite laminates, it is important to minimize or reduce occurrences of delaminations. In particular, a peel-up delamination at entrance and push-out delamination at exit are common. Delaminations may be avoided by regulating the drill thrust force can be controlled by adjusting the feedrate of the drill. Dynamics involved in drilling of composite laminates is time varying and ...

• An efficient and robust strength optimization method for novel composite laminates. A global Tsai-Wu oriented failure index is built to aggregate measurement. lamination-parameter-based approximation, ensuring smooth convergence, derived. Benchmark tests confirm the superiority of approach local-based one. computationally-efficient tailoring laminates using lamination parameters developed. Th...

The need for renewable bio-based materials that could replace well-established synthetic composite is rapidly growing. For example, are increasingly used in applications where a lightweight design should be combined with sustainability and recyclability. However, it often very challenging to directly transfer the excellent properties of biological product scalable cost-efficient manner. In this...

We present a composite material with embedded sensing and actuation that can perform permanent shape changes by temporarily varying its stiffness and applying an external moment. Varying stiffness is a complementary approach to actuator-chain based approaches that can be accomplished using a large variety of means ranging from heat, electric field or vacuum. A polycaprolactone (PCL) bar provide...

Laminated composite structures operating in a marine environment are subject to moisture ingress. Due to the slow diffusion process of moisture, the distribution of moisture is not uniform so that the laminates can develop hygrothermal stresses. An accurate prediction of the moisture concentration and the associated hygrothermal stress is vital to the understanding of the effect of marine envir...

during the last decades a new class of materials named fiber/metal laminates (fmls) was introduced. it is a hybrid composite consisting of alternating thin layers of metal sheets and fiber-reinforced composite material. fmls have both low weight and good mechanical properties. in this study, the impact behavior of this attractive material is investigated. the effect of fiber angle, stacking seq...

This study proposes a simulation method to evaluate fatigue progressive damage in composite laminates using intra-laminar and inter-laminar models. The damages are modeled continuum mechanics cohesive zone model, respectively, the evolution laws of formulated. A combining finite element models described this paper. Fatigue simulations conducted on curved specimen results that compared with expe...

BACKGROUND Biaxial (BX) and triaxial (TX) composite laminates with ±45° angled plies have been widely used in wind turbine blades. As the scale of blades increases, BX and TX laminates with shallow-angled plies (i.e. off-axis ply angle <45°) might be utilized for reducing mass and/or improving performance. The compressive properties of shallow-angled BX and TX laminates are critical considering...

The use of fiber reinforced materials such as randomly-oriented strands has grown in recent years, especially for manufacturing of aerospace composite structures. This growth is mainly due to their advantageous properties: they are lighter and more resistant to corrosion when compared to metals and are more easily shaped than continuous fiber composites. The resistance and stiffness of these ma...