An analytical approach of design for recycling of laminate structures by the use of magnetic pulse disassembling

Abstract

Composite materials in association with metal sheets or ceramic coatings have found a variety of applications, especially as load-bearing components in composite structures. Their disassembly for recycling or maintenance has therefore become more complex. The magnetic pulse technique, usually dedicated to dynamic forming and welding processes, can be used to separate composite materials of a laminate structure of their recyclable adjacent materials. This technology profits from Lorentz forces appearing in electrically conductive materials placed in the vicinity of conductors in which high-intensity electrical discharges are performed. These body forces act locally during the fast energy discharge, from which a stress wave propagates in the structure. The propagation of this stress wave can be used to generate interfacial tensile stress in laminate structures or assemblies. Especially, this technique can be used for evaluating the dynamic bond strength of an interface. This works aims at determining the required conditions for disassembling a laminate structure using a magnetic pulse imposed on one side of the assembly, without significantly damaging the debonded layers. Ideally, the generated interfacial tensile stress should be greater than the interfacial bond strength. In this paper, a one-dimensional analytical analysis is performed in linear elastodynamics on a tri-layered laminate structure, infinite in transverse directions, based on the method of characteristics. An optimisation problem is defined, maximising the interfacial stress between the first two layers, whose solution requires to study various configurations of the assembly involving different sets of characteristics in the laminate, associated with different areas of the domain of feasibility spanned by the unknown vector. Some assumptions and introduced simplifications of the optimisation problem allows to follow a simple two-stage solution procedure, first with respect to the thickness of the first layer for a given stress pulse, then with respect to material impedances of all layers. Several configurations of the assembly are shown to create a sufficiently large interfacial tensile stress to reach the crack initiation and propagation, and a maximum tensile interface stress of twice the maximum applied pressure is obtained in the asymptotic limit.