The Impact of Recycling on the Fibre and the Composite Properties of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics

This work addresses recycling effects on carbon fibres and their composites. Developments in single fibre testing, such as the consideration of non-circular fibre shapes and direct strain measurements, are presented. The bulk moulding compound process appears to be a straightforward recycling route for end-of-life fibres and production waste. The investigations shall encourage industry do substitute virgin material with recycled fibres, supporting their pursuit of sustainable mobility

Influence of the curing cycles on the fatigue performance of unidirectional glass fiber reinforced epoxy composites

During the manufacturing process of fiber reinforced polymers the curing reaction of the resin results in shrinkage of the resin and introduces internal stresses in the composites. When curing at higher temperatures in order to shorten up the processing time, higher curing stresses and thermal stresses are built up and frozen, as residual stresses occur. In the present work, a glass fiber reinforced epoxy composite laminate with an unidirectional architecture based on non-crimp fabrics with backing fibers is investigated. Three different curing cycles (timetemperature cycles) are used, leading to different levels of internal stresses. The mechanical properties, static strength and fatigue life time, are measured in three different directions of the material, i.e. the fiber direction, 0°, the 30° off axis direction, and the 90° direction transverse to the fiber direction. It is experimentally demonstrated that the resulting residual stresses barely influences the quasi-static mechanical properties of reinforced glass-fiber composites. It is found that the fatigue performance in the 0° direction is signicantly influenced by the internal stresses, whereas the fatigue performance in the off axes directions so is not signicantly influenced of these stresses. This is related to the observations that the damage mechanisms in the off axes directions are mainly related to shear failure in the matrix and in the interface between fiber and matrix and different from the damage mechanisms in the fiber direction, where the damage initiates in the transverse backing fibers and is directly related to fiber fractures in the load-carrying axial fiber bundles

SmartPIV: flow velocity estimates by smartphones for education and field studies

In this paper, a smartphone application is presented that was developed to lower the barrier to introduce particle image velocimetry (PIV) in lab courses. The first benefit is that a PIV system using smartphones and a continuous wave (cw-) laser is much cheaper than a conventional system and thus much more affordable for universities. The second benefit is that the design of the menus follows that of modern camera apps, which are intuitively used. Thus, the system is much less complex and costly than typical systems, and our experience showed that students have much less reservations to work with the system and to try different parameters. Last but not least the app can be applied in the field. The relative uncertainty was shown to be less than 8%, which is reasonable for quick velocity estimates. An analysis of the computational time necessary for the data evaluation showed that with the current implementation the app is capable of providing smooth live display vector fields of the flow. This might further increase the use of modern measurement techniques in industry and education