GOALI: Behavior of Materials from Natural Cellulose Fibers and Plant Resins for Automotive and Other Applications

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This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project with Ford Motor Company concerns the mechanical behavior of composites of nanometer-sized fibers from woody and herbaceous sources contained in synthetic and naturally derived resins. Research on the manufacture, characterization and mechanics of these materials will be jointly conducted at both the university and industrial partner's facilities. Based on previous research, the materials are expected to have pronounced ability to reduce vibration and to perform well under some impact conditions. Potential applications of the materials are in the public infrastructural area where they could be used in energy dissipation systems such as guard rails and safety flooring. Transportation industries are potential major users of bio-based materials due to the wide diversity of applications and the magnitude of resource consumption and product turnover. Transportation related applications include exterior vehicle body panels, interior energy absorbing material, and bumper energy reinforcements. Nanocellulose is inexpensive, widely available and can displace petroleum used in conventional fillers. Cellulose will be trialed from woody and soy sources. Since soybeans are an excess crop in the United States, industrial uses bolster the nation's farmers. Other broader impacts of the project include a large number of outreach activities, potential applications outside of the target field such as in bioengineering, and the education of a team of REU students, a GSRA and a Ford engineer.The objective of the project is to create optimized cellulose nanocomposites via a research plan including sophisticated manufacturing techniques, finite element modeling of the composite nanostructure, and, vibration, viscoelastic and rate dependent constitutive testing. A goal is to tune the nanostructure of the materials to yield specific macroscopic characteristics. In preliminary modeling, it has been found that the dynamic response of material nanostructure of biocomposites can benefit from control of regional gradients of strain rate at the nanoscale. A ramification of this result is the suppression of local stress concentrations that are often the sites of dynamic fracture initiation in composites. The research could lead to novel nanocomposites that are well optimized for dynamic applications. Sophisticated manufacturing will advance current state-of-the-art functionalization techniques to improve the compatibility of nanocellulose and common matrix polymers. A full set of dynamic-mechanical data will result for the materials, as well as a model for damping, that would be useful to other researchers. The conclusions from the modeling can indicate how to best construct nanostructure to achieve particular performance characteristics, such as damping, creep, impact resistance and energy dissipation.