Characterization of the Sheared Edge Quality of Blanked Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics

Abstract

Due to a high specific strength, carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) enable material driven light-weighting of structural components. A constant increase of CFRP usage is predicted to continue in the future. At high production numbers blanking can be cost efficiently used for piercing or trimming operations of cured CFRP components. Compared with metals, sheared edges of blanked CFRP demonstrate fundamentally different morphology. Therefore, conventional characterization parameters cannot be used for an unambiguous characterization of the sheared edge quality. In the scope of this work, surface profile parameters were adopted for this purpose. The applicability of the quality parameters was successfully shown on the example of experimentally produced sheared edges. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the proposed sheared edge quality parameters enable the quality assessment under process inherent variability of the sheared edge morphology in CFRP.

Characterization of piercing damage in CFRP cross-ply laminates after punch shear machining via impact loading

“…Similarly, Klocke et al 16 experimentally investigated the cutting force, delamination, and hole accuracy after punching. Shirobokov et al 17 experimentally investigated the trimming of unidirectional thermosetting CFRP laminates by varying the fiber orientation according to the cutting line. Ho et al 18 investigated the effect of prepreg sheet size on punching.…”