A 3D printed film for joints: integrated manufacturing, toughening and properties tuning by Charline Van Innis

Many complex structures such as airplanes are made of dissimilar materials, combining for instance Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Composites and metal sheets. Manufacturing these multimaterial structures requires an efficient bonding process, but also high crack propagation resistance. However, adhesive joints suffer still from time and labour-intensive processes and low to moderate fracture toughness. Joint architecturing with stop holes or meshes is one of the strategies already investigated to improve the joint fracture toughness. An attractive option to improve the process efficiency is to perform bonding and composite curing simultaneously. As a first step on the road to the integrated bonding of hybrid metallic composite structures, potential toughening strategies relying on joint architecturing are investigated in this work while co-curing two composites parts.

A patterned thermoplastic film is designed for this purpose. The film makes possible a fully integrated manufacturing of joints with fracture toughness values unattained by classical adhesive joints with the possibility of fine tuning the joint properties by controlling the filling of the channels. Opposite to classical adhesive joints, this film allows for integrated manufacturing and properties tuning combined with a high fracture toughness.

Speaker : Charline VAN INNIS