An Investigation into the Deep Drawing of Fiber-Metal Laminates based on Glass Fiber Reinforced Polypropylene

Abstract   Fiber-metal laminates (FMLs) are new type of composite materials which could improve defects of traditional composites in ductility, formability, impact and damage tolerance. Drawing behavior of a thermoplastic based FML was investigated consisting of glass-fiber reinforced polypropylene composite laminate and aluminum AA1200-O as the core and skin layers, respectively. The effects of process variables consisting of blank-holder force, temperature, blank diameter and blank thickness were studied on the forming behavior of the FML. To reduce the number of experiments and investigate process variables on maximum drawing force and wrinkling of specimens, design of experiments was used. The experimental results were indicated that the general effects of blank-holder force on the failure mode in FMLs and the effects of blank diameter and blank thickness of a FML in deep drawing was similar to custom metals. Furthermore results were demonstrated that a high interaction between the temperature and the blank-holder force was required to remove the wrinkling. To validate the results of experiments, engineering constants of GFRP were obtained using Timoshenko’s beam theory and numerical simulations were performed by the finite element software, ABAQUS.