Plant fibers can be used to produce composite materials for automobile parts, thus reducing plastic used in their manufacture, overall vehicle weight and fuel consumption when they replace mineral fillers and glass fibers. Soybean stem residues are, potentially, significant sources of inexpensive, renewable and biodegradable natural fibers, but are not curretly used for biocomposite production ...

Schlieren interferometry is found to be an alternative tool for temperature measurement during thermoplastic laser welding with regard to methods based on thermocouples or optical pyrometers. In fact, these techniques are not easily applied when materials to be processed have reduced thickness, negligible heat conduction, and low emissivity, as is the case of welding high-density polyethylene f...

In the context of modern engineering practice, this paper describes the exploitation of thermoplastic materials for the provision of lightweight, low cost, corrosion free, alignment devices for lower limb prostheses. After setting out design requirements, four newly developed devices are described and discussed. These are respectively a four jack system, a serrated wedge system, a spherical ali...

Deterioration of bridges in the United States has been well recognized. According to the FHWA National Bridge Inventory, one third of nearly 600,000 U.S. highway bridges are classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Since the majority of bridges were built using wood, steel or concrete, the same conventional materials have been used for bridge replacement or rehabilitation,...

We describe a method for increasing the diffraction efficiency of multiply exposed photorefractive holograms by periodic copying. The method is experimentally demonstrated with photorefractive and thermoplastic recording media.

Optimization of the stress transfer capability of the fibre-matrix interphase region is critical to achieving the required performance level in thermoplastic matrix composites. Despite the ever increasing diversity of the reinforcements available for polymer composites, glass fibres still account for 95% of fibre reinforcements used in the composites industry, primarily due to of their highly a...