Quasi-Isotropic and Pseudo-Ductile Highly Aligned Discontinuous Fibre Composites Manufactured with the HiPerDiF (High Performance Discontinuous Fibre) Technology
M. L. Longana,
H. Yu,
J. Lee,
T. R. Pozegic,
S. Huntley,
T. Rendall,
K. D. Potter,
I. Hamerton
Affiliations
M. L. Longana
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
H. Yu
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
J. Lee
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
T. R. Pozegic
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
S. Huntley
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
T. Rendall
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
K. D. Potter
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
I. Hamerton
Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS), Department of Aerospace Engineering, School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering, Queen’s Building, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
Conventional composite materials reinforced with continuous fibres display high specific strength but have a number of drawbacks including: the elastic-brittle behaviour, difficulties in producing defect-free components of complex shape with high-volume automated manufacturing processes, and inherent lack of recyclability. Highly aligned, discontinuous fibre-reinforced composites (ADFRCs) are truly beneficial for mass production applications, with the potential to offer better formability and comparable mechanical properties with continuous fibre-reinforced composites. In previous publications, the High Performance Discontinuous Fibre (HiPerDiF) technology has been shown to offer the possibility to intimately hybridise different types of fibres, to achieve pseudo-ductile tensile behaviour, and remanufacture reclaimed fibres into high-performance recycled composites. However, to date, the work has been conducted with unidirectional (UD) laminates, which is of limited interest in engineering applications with mechanical stresses acting across many directions; this paper reports, for the first time, the mechanical behaviour of quasi-isotropic (QI) ADFRCs. When compared with randomly-oriented discontinuous fibre composites (RODFRCs), QI ADFRCs offer enhanced stiffness (+26%) and strength (+77%) with higher consistency, i.e., a reduction of the coefficient of variance from the 25% of RODFRCs to the 6% of ADFRCs. Furthermore, hybrid QI ADFRCs retain the pseudo-ductility tensile behaviour previously observed in unidirectional (UD) lay-up.
