European conference on composite materials (ECCM2018)
- General
- Athens, Greece,
AIMEN will be present at the ECCM2018 presenting the work developed under ComMUnion project: DIRECT JOINING OF LASER-TEXTURED TITANIUM ALLOYS AND CFTPCS
Transport industry is dominated by the light-weight challenge driven by both environmental concerns (increase the fuel efficiency and reduce the CO2 emissions) and cost reduction. Using mixtures of materials and multi-material design of components provides an opportunity to develop products which could achieve this challenge. A critical aspect in multi-material fabrication is the surface condition and joining. In this work, CFTPCs (carbon fibre reinforced thermoplastic composites) made of CF-PEEK tapes were joined to an aeronautic titanium alloy. Different laser textures were used and compared with other surface treatments like chemical etching and grit blasting. Hot-press was used to optimize the fabrication of CFTPCs laminates to choose the better parameters to join them to the metal directly. Tensile tests and Optical Microscopy were used for testing their quality. For joining the CFTPCs to the titanium, the use of a PEEK film was also considered. The surface optimization and quality of joining were studied using single lap joint tests. Different surface conditions yield several shear strength results. Particularly, with grit blasting very poor values are obtained. However, laser texturing improves significantly the joint strength, above all when a PEEK film is used. In this case, structural resistances over 20MPa were obtained.