This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The research objective of this award is to design, fabricate and test, thermoformed composite structures reinforced with knitted textile materials. The knitted reinforcement will be engineered to improve formability in conventional thermoforming machines and to optimize the energy absorption capability of the final formed part during high-impact loading. The two main deliverables in this project are: 1) Accurate characterization of the mechanical behavior of thermoformed knitted composites through experimental measurements, and 2) Development of the necessary theoretical/computational tools to predict the behavior of this class of composites when subjected to large deformations and impact loading. The experimental characterization is needed to formulate suitable constitutive relationships for the biaxial deformation mechanisms of thermoplastics with knitted reinforcement in thermoforming processes and impact loading. These constitutive relationships will in turn be used to design manufacturing processes for complex knitted composite structures that exhibit optimal energy absorption characteristics using specialized computational models.
If successful, the results of this research will result in the development of a new thermoplastic processing technology for manufacturing large load-bearing flexible composite structures optimized for high-impact applications. Adding additional functionality to thermoformed composite structures, by maximizing energy absorption capability, should be of value to U.S. manufacturing industries interested in developing cost effective techniques for manufacturing lightweight loading-bearing composite structures. It is anticipated that the development of a knitted reinforcement technology for thermoformed load-bearing structures will be particularly valuable in automotive, marine, and aerospace applications. The training of undergraduate students in designing with composite thermoplastic materials for load-bearing applications, and graduate students in the development of advanced finite element software for simulating complex manufacturing problems, is an important contribution to the state of technology that ultimately improves the competitiveness of US industries.
