Manufacturing And Strength test of E-glass Reinforced HDPE, And Single Strap Joint For Exposed Auto Body
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Date
2014-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Due to ever tougher environmental and passive safety regulations, lightweight materials are getting considerable attention to reduce vehicle weight, fuel consumption, and improve the crashworthiness. Some of the existing promising light weight materials are Fibre-reinforced polymers (FRP) that are made of reinforcing fibers embedded in a polymer matrix. FRP are used extensively in automotive, aeronautic and naval engineering. FRP offers substantial improvements over metals not only for the specific stiffness and strength, but also for their resistance to corrosion, fatigue, and allowing part consolidation.
In this work, to understand critical problems related to the application of FRP in automotive body production, a recyclable E-glass thermoplastic composite material was developed. Besides, to address the critical joining problems in lightweight design, a parametric study of adhesive joins was carried out using developed composite substrate and frequently used metallic substrate and adhesive material by local automotive manufacturers.
Experimental results raveled that the E-glass thermoplastic composite consisted of high density polyethylene matrix. The composite material exhibited reasonably acceptable strength for automotive body applications. Parametric study of adhesive joint showed that strain distributions for the joint configurations are more sensitive to changes in adhesive thickness, overlap length, overlap width and surface finish. The results also showed that the lap shear strength of the joint primarily depends on the surface parameters of the substrate material rather than the material itself. These results can be used by engineers/designers to design lightweight automotive body and to predict the static strength of its adhesively bonded joint. These results can also contribute to the improvement of the locally built automobile body in reducing the weight.
Key words: reinforced, thermoplastic, E-glass, joint, adhesive, compatible
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Keywords
reinforced, thermoplastic, E-glass, joint, adhesive, compatible