Enhancing Damage Tolerance of the Constituents of Sandwich Composites

• Main Author: Nieto, Zackery Ryan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: ScholarWorks@UTEP 2023
• Subjects: Mechanical engineering|Materials science|Nanotechnology|Applied physics; Arctic
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI30819741

Composite structures have become a lucrative material choice for researchers throughout various sectors such as green energy, arctic travel, and aerospace application due to their light weight, high-bending to stiffness ratio, and job tailorable applications through material selection. With the increasing demand for new and better composite technologies growing each year it is imperative to investigate new materials and analytical options to help the composite field as a whole grow. In this report various materials and statistical applications have been studied regarding the constituent materials in sandwich composites. For core materials an additive manufactured photoreactive resin has been characterized for quasi-static properties at room and arctic temperature to pave the road for future geometric core implementations designed for arctic naval transportation. Uncertainty quantification has been applied to attach a statistical representation to vinyl-ester resin matrix systems to highlight influential parameters towards impact damage. Several systems of interlaminar reinforcement have been studied in the forms of Kevlar® pulp and vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNT) in an effort to increase the damage tolerance within composite systems. Kevlar® pulp studies investigated the impact damage mitigation at room and arctic temperatures and a brief review was performed on the current state of vertically aligned carbon nanotube interlaminar reinforcement technologies.