Investigations of Mechanical Behaviour of FRP Composites manufactured by the aid of Automated controlled resin Coating Process

Abstract

With light weight, high strength and stiffness properties of fiber reinforced composite laminates are widely used in the structural fabrication of aircraft, military and marine industries. In simple way the advanced composite laminates are made by mixing two parts, the matrix and the reinforcement manually using hand layup method and this leads to common defects like fiber waviness, non-uniform dispersion of resin and dimensional change after curing etc. To address these issues a controlled automated resin coating process is being successfully fabricated. The process was simple and quick to coat resin to any type of unidirectional (UD) and bi-directional (BD) woven fibers. By using this process, laminates were manufactured with optimized coating thickness between the plies and it was found that the laminates have minimum defects after curing. Further, the laminate specimens were tested for its mechanical properties and compared with specimen’s manufactured using manual hand layup method. The results reveals that the specimens made by both the methods showing almost similar mechanical properties.