Forming of Engineered Prepregs and Reinforced Thermoplastics

摘要

Composite materials, such as engineered prepregs and reinforced thermoplastics, have found widespread use in the aerospace industry. In addition, the recent development of low-cost materials suitable for medium/high volume production (e.g. commingled glass/polypropylene fabrics) has attracted much interest from the automotive sector. Manufacturing high-performance engineering components from sheet material requires careful design. For sheet metals this problem is usually addressed using numerical simulations. Therefore a pragmatic approach for composite sheet forming is to modify existing packages developed for metal stamping to take account of the complex rheology of composites. In this paper, attention is focused on modelling the various mechanisms that occur during forming of composite sheets. In particular, a model is proposed for the dominant mechanism, intraply shear, based on the matrix rheology and the fibre architecture. The results will be used to model composite sheet forming using an explicit nonlinear FE code (PAM-FORM).