The use of composite materials and composite stackups in aerospace and automotive applications has been and will continue to grow at a very high rate due to the high strength and low weight of the materials. One key problem manufacturers have using this material is the ability to efficiently drill holes through the layers to install fasteners and other components. This is especially true in sta...

The purpose of this research was to investigate the creep behaviour of the heterogeneous Timber-UHPFRC beams. New developments have been done to further improve the structural performance, such as strengthening of the timber (glulam) beam by bonding composite material combine with an ultra-high performance fibre reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) internally reinforced with or without carbon fibre rei...

Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) have good physical properties, such as high specific strength and high specific modulus. However, cutting delamination, tearing and burr, etc. often occur in the machining process of CFRP, which results in the uncontrollability of machining surface quality and serious tool wear. In this paper, milling of CFRP with a staggered cutter was carried out, the c...

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have been successfully applied in various applications. Fused deposition modeling (FDM), one of popular AM techniques, is most widely used method for manufacturing of plastic materials. Due to the poor strength properties of pure plastic materials, there is a critical need to improve mechanical properties for FDMfabricated pure plastic parts. One of the ...

This work reports the outcomes of an extensive experimental campaign on the retrofitting of masonry walls by means of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheets, carried out at University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Fribourg. In the first stage, static-cyclic shear tests were conducted on the masonry walls, followed by a second stage of tensile tests on alternative configurations of mechanical...

The axial compressive strength of unidirectional FRP made by pultrusion is generally quite lower than its axial tensile strength. This fact decreases the advantages of FRP as main load bearing member in engineering structure. A theoretical iterative calculation approach was suggested to predict the ultimate axial compressive stress of the combined structure and analyze the influences of geometr...

This paper propose a new concept of an eddy current (EC) multi-element sensor for the characterization of carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRP) to evaluate the orientations of plies in CFRP and the order of their stacking. The main advantage of the new sensors is the flexible parametrization by electronical switching that reduces the effort for mechanical manipulation. The sensor response was...

The production of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) is currently changing from a highly manual and expensive to an automated process. However for automated production of CFRP parts new sensor systems for quality control are required. In this article we present a photometric stereo inspection system that is able to automatically evaluate critical quality criteria of carbon fiber fabrics. Ba...

Externally bonded carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminates are a feasible and economical alternative to traditional methods for strengthening and stiffening deficient reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete girders as shown in Fig. (1). Although extensive research has already been undertaken to investigate the behavior of CFRP strengthened bridge girders, the majority of work condu...

A concept of a nature-inspired pedestrian bridge which tries to merge architectural, structural and manufacturing aspects in an optimized way is presented. The 18.0-m-span bridge is designed as an overhead spatial frame of a complex double-curved shape, which is composed of twelve modules consisting of lightweight carbon fiberreinforced polymer (CFRP) sandwich construction. The modules are fabr...