Composite Materials Essay

Introduction

1.1 History of Composite Materials

There were three principal driving forces that led to the interest and investment in composite materials in the world such as the designer's demand for lower weight and higher rigidity for aerospace structures, electronics, and other applications. At the beginning the 20th century composite structure materials did give a potential to meet these structural requirements of these various applications. Although composite materials had been known in various forms throughout the history of mankind, the history of modern composites probably began in 1937 when salesmen from the Owens Corning Fiberglass Company began to sell fiberglass to interested parties around the United States.

The development of composite material in the aerospace industry started when Douglas Aircraft Company bought the first roll of fiberglass shipped to the west coast because they believed that the fiberglass would help them solve a production problem. During the production process, the plastic molds were aimed to be reinforced with fiberglass such that it would become strong enough to allow at least a few parts to be made so that the new designs could be quickly verified. Indeed the fiberglass reinforcement did in fact prove to be stronger and it was a successful process. Moreover, new composites were made from fiberglass material and phenolic resin which the only resin available at the time. This was indeed a successful period for composite materials and more interest were attracted by many applications.

Figure 1: Glass Fiber Reinforced plastic application worldwide (JEC group 2011).

Figure 1 shows today’s composites marketplace which is widespread worldwide which is reported by JEC group in August 2011. As rep...

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...aints and the applied loads to the model. The rectangular composite was then basically restrained as simply supported on one side and a pressure load of 50 Mpa was applied to opposite side of the model.

The model was then ready to perform a linear static buckling analysis in Ansys. The linear static buckling analysis was set and ran through Ansys. It was then realized that due to having many parts as of being 3D composite structure, the analysis for it to run took excessive computational power and time for it to perform. An error that the CPU power time was exceeded kept on appearing and Ansys stopped running the analysis. It was then concluded that performing this 3D composite analysis requires great amount of computer power and time. Being a symmetric composite structure, it was then concluded that it would be better to perform the analysis using a 2D model.