3-D Textile Reinforcements in Composite Materials

摘要

In the later years of the 20th century, textile preforms became of increasing interest to researchers and manufacturers of advanced composites. The above two books, referred to below as B&P and Ed-AM, address this subject. Writers and lecturers on composites, such as Bergsma et al. in Ed-AM, often like to go back to prehistory, but they rapidly shoot forward to the 1980s [sic] with high-technology composites based on carbon- and aramid-fibre reinforced epoxies. The successful development of fibre-reinforced plastics, based first on cotton, then adding glass and, later, nylon in the first half of the 20th century receives, at most, a brief historical notice. For the last several decades, both academic and industrial research and development have concentrated on advanced composites for aerospace and other specialised applications. However, Klaus Drechsler of Daimler-Benz makes an important point in Ed-AM 'while the space industry spends up to some US$10,000 just to save 1kg of mass in a satellite, the automotive market currently accepts no more than US$10-20'. This means that more attention needs to be paid to high-volume, low-cost composites with good properties, but not necessarily the best that can be achieved technically.