Quality Assurance of Composite Materials for Powertrain Applications

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Quality Assurance of Composite Materials for Powertrain Applications

Willett, Andrew

Unidirectional carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) composite materials can be used in gas storage systems, lightweight housings for powertrain components (e.g. battery casing, transmission casing), and also for light-weighting of the vehicle body to reduce load on the powertrain. In each case, we would like to optimize costs and minimize the amount of composite required. Due to the complex interaction of many factors, it is often difficult to interpret the performance of composite prototype parts, and implement countermeasures regarding the materials, material synthesis route, and part production methods. One challenge we face is a lack of detailed real information on the incoming material feedstock. In particular, to obtain fibre content and fibre distribution it is necessary to cut the material and inspect it under a microscope. A single material spool may contain hundreds of meters of material, and therefore the extracted and inspected material may not be representative of the entire length of material. In this paper, we present a novel non-destructive and non-contact method for measuring the fibre content and fibre distribution of unidirectional carbon fibre composite materials based on terahertz time domain spectroscopy.