Fiber reinforced glass composites impact resistant

Delphi Automotive Sj ems, Woodridge, IL and Hendrickson Innovations International developed and manufactured a plastic composite (glass/ carbon fiber hybrid reinforcement) for use in the medium and heavy duty truck and bus markets. When compared to metals they are lighter and more impact resistant, require less mounting hardware, and designed to conduct 50% less vibration. 

As it is commonly known and applied for a long time, the properties of paste can be improved by reinforcement with the fibres. For example, the production of asbestos-cement materials started 80 years ago. The fiber reinforcement technology has been developed extensively for the last 20 years and the other fibres has been taken into account, first of all the steel fibres, but also the carbon, glass, resin, polypropylene and cellulose fibres as well. The fibres reinforcement gives the pos-sibihty to enhance the flexural and tension strength, as well as the impact resistance. The fibre composite modifies the properties of concrete by control cracking and the mode of failure by means of post—cracking ductility. 

With carbon reinforcements, it is possible to incorporate two or more different yarns (e.g. an aramid and carbon, or glass and carbon), to form a hybrid carbon reinforcement, enabling a designer to incorporate properties into a composite that fall between the performance levels of the chosen fibers. So the introduction of an aramid fiber into a carbon fabric reinforcement would improve the impact resistance, albeit at the expense of other mechanical properties. Special scissors are available to cut aramid fibers. 

Silverman characterized flexural creep resistance at 120°C (33) and room temperature impact resistance (34) for test specimens from injection-molded composites of chopped fibers versus machined specimens from compression molded continuous long GFR polypropylene sheets. His concepts of glass fiber reinforcement in stampable composites tend to mirror many of the attributes related to megacoupling of short GFRP. 

Compared to glass fiber and other foreign fiber reinforced polypropylenes, prominent characteristics are an exceptionally high impact strength and resistance to perforation [26,76]. These are caused by an efficient absorption of energy by self-reinforced fiber composite systems. 

This felt contained all components of the composite (i.e., matrix and reinforcement) in short fiber form. It was found that even a relatively small amount of GF (45 wt.% flax, 5 wt.% glass) resulted in a significant improvement in the dynamic impact properties. If the GF content was 20 wt.% and flax 30 wt.%, a twofold increase in the impact resistance was observed. 

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