Cellulose is the most important and the most abundant plant natural polymer. It shows a number of interesting properties including those making it attractive as a filler of composite materials with a thermoplastic polymer matrix. Production of such composite materials, meeting the standards of green technology, has increased from 0.36 million tons in 2007 to 2.33 million tons in 2012. It is pre...

An explicit commercial Finite Element (FE) code is used to simulate the forming of a thermoplastic viscous textile composite sheet over a hemispherical tool. The main success of this work is in combining two distinct models. The first model is a non-orthogonal rate-independent constitutive model that has been implemented previously in a commercial FE code [1, 2]. The second is a rate and temper...

A pre-consolidated thermoplastic advanced composite cross-ply sheet comprised of two uniaxial plies orientated at 0/90 o has been thermoformed using tooling based on the doubledome bench-mark geometry. The shear behavior of the material has been characterised as a function of rate and temperature using the picture frame test technique. Multi-scale modelling predictions of the material’s shear b...