This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) grant provides funding for the research and development of a new manufacturing process for advanced composite parts called Press Curing with Rubber-coated Tooling (PCRT). This is a new alternative to the standard practice of using a vacuum bag to encase the composite part to enable it to be subjected to high temperature and pressure in an autoclave for the final manufacturing step of consolidation and curing. The PCRT process eliminates the autoclave from the process and imparts the desired temperature and pressure through the use of a specially designed rubber-coated mold. Research objectives include gaining a deeper physical understanding of the process through extensive simulation and experimentation, creating robust simulation tools for designing mold sets, fundamental materials research on tooling, rubber masks, and interactions with composite systems, and expanding process capabilities to allow for eventual commercialization. The GOALI partner for this grant, Kintz Plastics, Inc. (Howes Cave, NY), will help with all aspects of the research work and be the first adopter of this technology.
If successful, the results of this research will fundamentally change how composite manufacturers make small- to medium-size laminate and sandwich parts requiring high consolidation pressure and temperature. It will eliminate one of the major manufacturing bottlenecks facing the composites industry the autoclave step in the process. A published study has shown that for a relatively complex three-dimensional composite laminate part, PCRT provides orders of magnitude reduction in preparation time, fixed and recurring costs and energy consumption as compared to using an autoclave, while still providing parts of similar quality. It is expected that similar results will be demonstrated for a wider range of part shapes and material systems as a result of this work.
