Fibre composites are being used in various applications from aerospace, military, marine boats and submarine to renewable energy generation. Higher energy demands across the developed and growing world for the usage and replacement of conventional materials with polymer composite materials for engineering applications which is always questioned by the end user, unless the research oriented reli...

SUMMARY In this paper the LUSAS High Precision Moulding (HPM) integrated finite element environment for composite process simulation is introduced and validated against test components with single and double curvatures. Presented results show dependence on the laminate thickness, radius and in-plane dimensions, these agree well with the experimental data.

This paper deals with topology optimization of composite structure using Bi-directional Evolutional Structural Optimization (BESO) method. By redefining the criteria of the optimization evolution progress, the proposed method is able to extend current BESO method from isotropic material to anisotropic composite material. The initial modification of BESO method is to allow for inefficient Materi...

Piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) are lightweight and inexpensive transducers that enable a large class of structural health monitoring (SHM) applications such as: (a) embedded guided wave ultrasonics, i.e., pitch-catch, pulse-echo, phased arrays; (b) high-frequency modal sensing, i.e., electro-mechanical impedance method; and (c) passive detection. The focus of this paper is on the cha...

The introduction of carbon-fibre reinforced plastics in load bearing automotive structures provides a great potential to reduce vehicle weight and fuel consumption. A reduction in overall manufacturing cost can be realised through part integration and use of cost-effective materials such as heavy tow carbon fibre. There is a current drive within the automotive industry to develop the technologi...

The use of composite materials in offshore engineering for deep sea oil production riser systems has drawn considerable interest due to the potential weight savings and improvement in durability. The design of composite risers consists of two stages: (1) local design based on critical local load cases, and (2) global analysis of the full length composite riser under global loads and assessment ...

This paper describes the modeling of magnetoelectric (ME) effects for disk-type Terfenol-D (Tb0.3Dy0.7Fe1.92)/PZT (Pb(Zr,Ti)O₃) laminate composite at low frequency by combining the advantages of the static elastic model and the equivalent circuit model, aiming at providing a guidance for the design and fabrication of the sensors based on magnetoelectric laminate composite. Considering that the ...

The present study reports the influence of fiber orientation, laminate sequence and fabric type on the inherent nonlinearity of intact carbon fiber/epoxy composites using nonlinear resonant ultrasonic spectroscopy (NRUS) [1-2]. Fiber orientation of the CFRP samples were changed relative to the length of the sample. Since the fundamental flexural mode is excited, the properties of the composite ...