Advanced composites take a powder
- Custom Composite Materials, Inc., Atlanta, GA (United States)
To a professional chemist with more than 25 years of industrial experience, the world of advanced composites is a fascinating new venue. Here resins and fibers come together in a completely synergistic partnership, achieving marvels of strength and light weight that make advanced composite materials virtually the only solution for challenging applications. In the late 1980s, Professor John Muzzy of the Georgia Institute of Technology, was intrigued by the physical properties of thermoplastics, and he developed a new way to bring the thermoplastic resins together with high-performance fibers. As part of the work Muzzy did with Lockheed and NASA he demonstrated that electrostatic powder coating was an attractive new method for combining thermoplastic resins with reinforcing fibers. Presentation of this work by Lockheed at a government-industry conference led to a new project for Muzzy, sponsored by NASA Langley. Powder prepregging proved to be the attractive alternative that NASA was looking for. While working on powder prepregging with LaRC-TPI, Muzzy and his colleagues developed methods for exposing all of the fibers to the powder to improve the distribution of the resin on the tow, a continuous bundle of filaments. Optimal resin distribution was achieved by spreading the moving tow. A very flexible towpreg was produced by maintaining the spread tow through the powder coating chamber and into the oven, where the resin particles were fused to the individual filaments. Muzzy's invention has enabled Custom Composite Materials, Inc. to offer resin/fiber combinations based on thermoplastic resins such as nylon and polypropylene. Beyond the expected advantages over epoxy thermoset systems, they are beginning to exploit a fundamental property of thermoplastic resins: viscoelasticity, which can be defined as the resistance to flow as a function of applied stress. Thermoplastics have a much higher viscoelasticity than thermosets.
- OSTI ID:
- 5788484
- Journal Information:
- CHEMTECH; (United States), Vol. 23:6; ISSN 0009-2703
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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