Research Initiation Award: Understanding Concentrated Fiber Suspensions and Deformation of Flexible Fibers in Fiber Reinforced Composite Materials Processing

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Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at his home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Prairie View A&M University has potential broader impact in a number of areas. The goal of the project is to understand concentrated fiber suspensions and deformation of flexible fibers in fiber reinforced composite materials processing and advance the design and manufacture of composite materials. The outcomes of these research activities have potential applications in areas such as fiber reinforced composites processing, drug delivery, blood cell transport and air dust drift. Undergraduate students will be involved in the research and the fiber motion tracking system will be an important laboratory facility for teaching purposes.The objectives of the research are to develop a new finite element based model in understanding concentrated fiber suspensions and fiber deformation in a viscous fluid; design a novel constitutive equation governing fiber interaction and deformation; and provide the experimental validation of the model. These objectives will be achieved by developing a finite element based simulation package to physically model the interactions among dense fibers with random initial orientations and separations, qualitatively and quantitatively establishing the correlation between fiber alignment rates and fiber-fiber interaction as well as fiber deformation, and setting up an experimental system to validate the model. This project will provide a systematic model capable of addressing fiber-fiber interaction and fiber deformation, critical areas that are currently unresolved in composite materials manufacturing. The developed constitutive equation will offer composites researchers a new model to predict and control fiber motion so as to produce the final products with excellent performance.