Damping, impact and flexural performance of novel carbon/Elium® thermoplastic tubular composites

The current research presents a first attempt to manufacture thermoplastic tubular composites using carbon fibre as reinforcement and an innovative Elium (R) resin as the matrix material using Bladder Assisted Resin Transfer Moulding (B-RTM) manufacturing process. The manufacturing process parameters required to achieve a fully impregnated thermoplastic composites were established, and the parts have undergone impact, flexure, and vibration damping tests. The mechanical properties and the failure modes are compared with the tubes manu-factured with conventional epoxy matrix. During impact testing, thermoplastic tubular composites have shown 16.3% and 18.9% higher peak load and major damage energy respectively compared to carbon/epoxy tubes. They have also shown distinctive failure modes, with acrylic Elium (R) composites tubes undergoing more ductile and spreaded failure whilst epoxy composites have shown brittle and catastrophic failure. Flexural tests have shown comparable load-carrying capability, higher strain to failure, and less delamination for carbon/Elium (R) composites compared to carbon/epoxy composites. These are attributed to the presence of microductlilty and other associated matrix deformation features shown during the fractographic analysis of carbon/Elium (R) composites. Vibration modal analysis tests have shown 21.7% higher structural damping for carbon/Elium (R) composite measured at different output locations on the tube. The differences in the failure mechanisms and the underlying reasons for the improvement shown by thermoplastic Elium (R) composite tubes under different mechanical tests are deliberated in this paper.