THE INFLUENCE OF PROCESS PARAMETERS ON THE MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF TEXTILE-REINFORCED THERMOPLASTIC COMPOSITE STRUCTURES AND THE FUNCTIONAL CAPABILITY OF INTEGRATED SENSOR ELEMENTS

摘要

Within the Collaborative Research Centre 639 "Textile-reinforced composite components for function-integrating multi-material design in complex lightweight applications" novel processes for the manufacturing of structures are developed. In this context the process chain from the filament to the part is considered [1, 2]. One focus is on the production of biaxial reinforced multi-layer fabrics (MKF) out of hybrid yarn textile thermoplastics (HYTT) and their processing to complex structures using novel mold- and manufacturing technologies. Based on preliminary tests it is known that process parameters like temperature, applied pressure and holding time have an influence on the mechanical properties of the analyzed material combination glass fiber and polypropylene (PP). Hence, the correlation of these parameters was analyzed using a statistical design of experiments method to set and achieve high mechanical properties of the samples. Furthermore, to exploit possible application and function integration, the capability of this applied material combination can be utilized by embedding sensor elements. In this context, the integration of sensors was investigated in some random tests. Here, different exemplary chosen production processes were compared concerning the functional capability of the sensors.