Structural design of aerospace composites with Hybrid Fibre Architectures

Continuous fibre (CF) aerospace preforms exhibiting excellent mechanical performance possess low formability characteristics and are confined to simple shell-like geometries with minimal curvatures. On the other hand, short fibre preforms such as randomly oriented strands (ROS) offer high formability but exhibit low mechanical performance. The manufacturing of composites involves time and huge costs. The overall research objective is to explore a trade-off solution that integrates the formability of ROS and performance of CF by hybridizing fibre architectures while using a low cost manufacturing technique. Compression moulding (CM) is a low cost manufacturing method and thermoplastics are ideal matrix systems that complement CM. Specific research objectives include determining the rules of hybridization to produce synergistic relations, experimental evaluation and numerical prediction of stiffness and strength of hybrids fabricated with CM. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Larry Lessard;Pascal Hubert

Student:

Partner:

Bell Helicopter Textron Canada (Inactive)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Aerospace; Technology; Advanced Manufacturing

University:

McGill University

Program: