MANUFACTURING OF POLYMER COMPOSITE PARTS USING AUTOMATED SHORT CYCLE TIME TECHNOLOGY FOR AUTOMOTIVE APPLICATIONS FOCUSING ON THE COMPLEXITY AND RECYCLABILITY
Composite parts are light, stiff and if designed well, very durable thanks to the complex and variable microstructure. However, such high performance composite parts can only be used in very exclusive applications and narrow industry segments because of high manufacturing costs and uncertainty in the design and analysis process in demanding mechanical situations. The NVKP16 project targets this status quo and with the help of the intensive use of FEM, we will meet the high demands in the design and analysis process in the near future to make Fibre Reinforced Platics (FRP) more affordable.
Our mission in this project is to understand a whole chain of physical phenomena and through research, a whole new group of numerical methods will be developed, implemented and made commercially available in partnership with ANSYS.
Main research field of the project:
- Qualifying and quantifying manufacturing imperfection influence on structural performance;
- Develop a generic damage model for the prediction of fatigue (progressive degradation) of FRP materials;
- Realistic modelling and prediction of composite delamination as a failure mode;
- Automated material stiffness, strength and post critical performance evaluation based on a few simple coupon tests with the same layup as the target product providing direct vital input to FE calculations;
- Efficient modelling technique that makes FE assessments faster whilst the accuracy remains acceptable.
