Publications

Sensory polymer composites are highly desirable for applications such as in situ and real-time production processes and structural health monitoring, and for technologies that include human-machine interfaces for the next generation of Internet of Things. However, the development of these materials is still in its infancy: these materials have been reported, but the large-scale fabrication of polymer composites with versatile and customizable ...

Today, global environmental issues, such as global warming and fossil depletion, drive a paradigm shift in material applications from conventional fossil sources to renewable sources. Following this trend, the topic of this thesis is to analyse the use of biobased resources for fibre reinforced composite fabrication. Currently the most widely used fibre reinforced composites are composed of glass fibre reinforcements and polymeric matrices. In ...

Electrospun (polymeric) nanofibers are proved to be one of the most successful toughening techniques for improving the damage resistance of structural fiber-reinforced polymer composite laminates. In the past decade, we have seen a steady increase in published research papers and industrial interest on this topic. In this chapter, we highlight the major findings related to the use of electrospun nanofiber toughening veils together with a concise ...

Nothing is perfect, and composite materials are no exceptions. In the micro- and meso-structure of Fiber-Reinforced Composites (FRCs), there are imperfections that are created during their manufacturing. Being called "manufacturing defects", these imperfections can influence the mechanical performance of FRCs. They include fiber waviness and misalignment, broken fibers, initial fiber/matrix debondings, initial delaminations, incomplete matrix ...

Highly sensitive conductive polymer composites for piezoresistive sensing are developed by a design of the formulation variables of extrusion-based manufacturing (filler type/amount, polymer amount) and annealing (a), considering thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) and/or olefin block copolymer (OBC) as polymer matrix and carbon black (CB) as conductive filler. With ternary composites - based on a CB type with stronger filler-matrix interactions ...

This chapter presents the results of the synthesis of inorganic polymers from an iron‐silicate slag, originating from non‐ferrous metallurgy, and potassium silicate solutions. The composite mixture had a solution/slag ratio of 0.3 and 3 wt.% of basalt fibers. Motivation for the selection of basalt fibers was provided by dissolution tests in comparison with E‐glass and carbon fiber. It was found that the liquid/solid ratio during the dissolution ...

Microfibrillar composites are an interesting class of composites where a high melting fibrillated polymer reinforces a lower melting matrix polymer by applying a specific processing sequence. This paper focuses on the influence of a compatibilizer on the morphology and mechanical properties of the composites. Therefore, microfibrillar composites of polypropylene (PP) and poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) have been prepared by twin-screw ...

A shape memory polymer (SMP) can be deformed from a permanent to a temporary shape above their transformationtemperature. Upon reheating, the SMP spontaneously returns to the permanent shape. SMP’s show high deformability,but the recovery stresses are very low, thus limiting the size of the components. This paper presents the first results ofan ongoing research to develop large sized components based on SMP. To achieve higher recovery stresses, ...

The translaminar fracture toughness is a key property that governs the damage tolerance and notch sensitivity of fibre-reinforced composites. Compact tension tests were performed to investigate the translaminar fracture toughness of composites reinforced with three types of high-performance polymer fibres: polyarylate (PAR), polybenzobisoxazole (PBO) and aramid fibre. A carbon fibre composite was used as the reference system. The propagation ...