Research | Funded Projects

ECO-MANUFACTURING OF ADVANCED LIGHTWEIGHT MATERIALS

The aim of this project is the development of innovative and environmental-friendly processes for the realization of advanced lightweight materials. The following schedule for the activities to be performed is considered at this stage: 1. Selection of innovative and promising environmental-friendly processes to be analyzed; 2. Start-up of laboratory scale injection pultrusion and liquid composite moulding processes. The optimization of the processes, in terms of configuration and process parameters, will be obtained through theoretical analysis and computational simulations. 3. Testing of microwave resins curing and post-curing of fiber reinforced plastic composites. 4. Design and setup of new monitoring systems able to detect signals intimately related to resin flow and preform saturation, temperature and degree of cure, void content, stress-strain development; 5. Implementation of numerical models useful to simulate thermo-chemical-mechanical phenomena that occur during the processes. The validation of these models will be obtained thanks to numerical-experimental data comparison.