Recent Research in Composite Materials: Nanomaterials and Fatigue, Compressive Strength, Articulated LCM ”

Recent Research in Composite Materials: Nanomaterials and Fatigue, Compressive Strength, Articulated LCM ”

Abstract

Brief summaries of recent research in mechanical behavior and processing of structural composites will be presented. Topics discussed are: Nanomaterials and fatigue damage, compressive strength models, and liquid composite molding (LCM). Incorporating small quantities of carbon nanotubes is shown to produce increases in the high-cycle fatigue strengths of glass composites which normally show significant degradation in fatigue strength with cycling. Fatigue data and high-resolution electron microscopy on glass fiber composites modified with well-dispersed carbon nanotubes provide evidence that distributed nanocracking by the carbon nanotubes extends fatigue life. The second topic is on a new model for the compressive strength in which the incorporation of an interphase is shown to provide an explanation for the observed dependence of the compressive strength with volume fraction in a variety of composite materials. The third topic is a study of the effect of incorporating tool articulation during resin transfer molding which accelerates molding speeds by a factor of ten or more. Models, experimental data and potential applications will be discussed.