An investigation into the performance of aligned, discontinuous carbon fibre produced with the scaled-up HiPerDiF process

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Fibre reinforced polymer composites provide the opportunity to produce lighter, cheaper and, durable products with increased mechanical performance compared with metallics. However, this creates challenges related to the complex manufacturing processes, and composite waste. Waste fibres are in a discontinuous and randomly oriented form and to create a valuable product it is necessary to realign them to achieve high volume fractions. The HiPerDiF technology, invented at the University of Bristol, can process a variety of fibre types to produce a highly aligned discontinuous fibre preforms. The advantages of using discontinuous fibres are that they provide better handling and forming capabilities with the potential to reduce defects. The cured composite material can also achieve mechanical properties comparable to that of its continuous counterparts. While significant progress has been made to optimize the mechanical performance of aligned discontinuous fibre prepregs produced using HiPerDiF technology, it has mostly been lab-based with a low throughput. As a result, this has allowed a limited characterisation of the produced material. A new generation machine, HiPerDiF 3G, capable of producing kg/hr quantities of aligned discontinuous fibre prepregs has been recently installed. This will industrialise the HiPerDiF technology, making it suitable to a wide range of composite applications. With the increased production rate, enough material can be produced to allow a full characterisation of the produced material both in terms of quality control and its mechanical performance under various loading conditions. The project will concentrate on virgin discontinuous fibres sourced from production waste.The scale-up of any new technology brings with it new challenges. Therefore, this project will aim to identify risks associated with transforming the process into a larger scale and investigating the effects on the performance and quality of the produced material. To achieve this, the project will:- Produce panels using material from HiPerDiF 3G to compare with panels produced with continuous fibre prepreg of the same constituent materials.- Design and conduct a testing campaign that will analyse mechanical performance, failure properties, and fibre physical properties to determine the material's limits.- Experimentally determine the feasibility of optimising the process to maximise performance by varying the key process parameters.- Explore suitable measurement techniques which can be used to implement quality control into the HiPerDiF 3G manufacturing process. Based on the results of this project, further research can be conducted to establish an efficient control strategy with a better understanding of the process parameters interactions and their effects.This project will be supported by Solvay.