Mesostructural simulation of discontinuous prepreg platelet based carbon fibre sheet moulding compounds informed by X-ray computed tomography
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
10th Conference on Industrial Computed Tomography
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Discontinuous prepreg platelet based carbon fibre sheet moulding compound (CF-SMC) materials offer huge potential for lightweight applications in the automotive industry. The composition of these materials and the flow behaviour during compression moulding result in a complex stochastic mesostructure, which presents a challenge in the modelling of the mechanical behaviour. The objective of the current work is to use the information obtained from multiscale X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scans to generate full-scale three- dimensional finite element models of tensile coupon specimens for the prediction of the elastic modulus. The models incorporate the stochastic distribution and discontinuous nature of the prepreg plate-lets. Defects such as porosity, resin-rich areas and fibre waviness can be observed by means of XCT. Porosity is found to be below 0.0076 vol.% and thus negligible. An average volume fraction of 6.48 vol.% of interlaminar resin-rich areas is considered in the mesostructural simu-lations. The predicted values of the tensile modulus are validated by experimental tensile tests on basis of a large series of specimens. The statistical analysis of variance methodology is employed to reach conclusive validation. The inherent stochasticity of prepreg platelet based CF-SMC materials is well captured with the proposed mesos-tructural simulation approach and the variability in their mechanical properties is accurately predicted.
Forschungs-