Carbon composite boom for concrete pumping truck: a technological challenge

摘要

Composite materials, and carbon fibre in particular, are generally used in applications where weight reduction is directly connected to performance. It is customary to think of sport cars with carbon fibre chassis parts or body works, and this is even more natural in the aeronautic field, where payload advantages justify some cost increase. The most typical applications are complex-shaped components made of thin solid laminates, or thicker parts involving sandwich structures. Generally, the thickness of a body panel ranges from 1 mm to 2.5 mm, as an order of magnitude. When the required stiffness involves increasing the thickness over 4 mm, engineers commonly switch to sandwich technology, where the second area moment is increased by a central low-density core, whose main function is to remove the noble material from the neutral axis of the section.