ProFVK - ProFVK - Industrielle Produktionsprozesse für die Verarbeitung von FaserVerbundKundststoffen und zur Herstellung von Leichtbaustrukturen

Fibre reinforced plastics (FRP) have become synonymous with lightweight construction in recent years. The enormous potential of FRP in lightweight applications is indisputable. However, one of the major drawbacks of components made of FRP are their labour- and cost-intensiveness due to manufacturing complexity. Manufacturing processes which are currently available, only allow for highly selective use of FRP in structural components (such as in the aerospace industry). To ensure greater competitiveness of this class of materials, every effort must be undertaken to drastically improve upon the manufacturing processes, more specifically to rethink these processes. Especially in conjunction with thermoplastic fiber reinforced plastics (tpFRP), which are subject of this project in particular, both materials as well as manufacturing processes have not been fully developed yet. Therefore it is necessary to work out the fundamentals of fiber-matrix-combinations and the individual processes in the first step, in order to further optimize these and finally use them in manufacturing. Within the framework of this project, given in the following overview, elemental research topics will be dealt with such as: What type of fiber-matrix-combinations result in, considering their composition, what properties of tapes and sheets? How can these be modified? What processes are suitable to bring such materials together, forming a composite (including cores, local reinforcements, fiber placement orientations)? How do the processing paths affect the material properties? How can such materials be formed three-dimensionally? How can such processes be designed efficiently?