Simulation-assisted development of material-, load- and process-specific inserts for thermoplastic composites

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Maik Gude
• Subject Area: Lightweight Construction, Textile Technology ; Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 408132410

The design and dimensioning of joining zones often represents a key factor for the successful development of hybrid lightweight components for automotive industry, machine and plant manufacture. The application of metallic load introduction elements as a reliable and efficient joining technique for continuous fibre reinforced plastics is widely accepted in most areas of lightweight design. To date, such inserts either have to be embedded with high effort during component manufacturing or need an additional process step for integration. By means of a novel automated process inserts now can be integrated during component manufacturing utilising warm forming technology. Throughout this process, the reinforcing fibres are reoriented by a tapered pin, resulting in a complex material structure with locally varying fibre orientations and fibre volume fractions. In the design process of such joints, the material structure in the load introduction zone has to be considered to enable a reliable description of the load-bearing behaviour. However, continuous multi-scale processing and structural simulation methods are not available yet, and a strictly experimental characterisation would require an inappropriate testing effort.Hence, within this project an experimentally-assisted numerical characterisation method for warm formed joining zones shall be developed, enabling an efficient systematic design of load application zones with embedded inserts. Thereby, for each insert design only one representative joining zone is manufactured and then analysed by computed tomography to determine local fibre orientations and fibre contents on microscale. Based on this data the local material properties are determined and implemented into an FE model. With this model, the deformation and damage behaviour of the joining zone can now be numerically analysed for all design-relevant loading scenarios. These results shall then be used to propose a systematic design process for load application elements, accounting material structure and process specific aspects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr.-Ing. Robert Kupfer