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Engineering and technology
- Polymer composites
Tiled Composites (TC) are a bio-inspired oblique layered material, composed of stacking individual plies in a tiled fashion and joining them together with a polymer to form a rigid structural material. This concept has great potential in different sectors as it allows the manufacturing of composite plates from tiled strips of fabric which opens up the door for robotised production. The concept of Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) based TC’s in structural applications is an innovative adaptation of the classical sandwich panel where skin-core delamination after accidental damage cannot grow, rendering a robust FRP sandwich concept. We call this concept a tiled sandwich. In addition, a plate material is created where the reinforcement is not parallel to the outer surfaces, called a tiled laminate. The project has the goal to understand and model these concepts and push the state-of-the-art since this knowledge is currently non-existing. This project focuses on two different implementations namely a FRP composite and a hybrid metal-composite. A framework for modelling and characterisation will be developed through a multiscale approach at three levels: meso, macro and structural. The intended multi-scale modelling is a sequential approach, with a hierarchy of computational efforts supported by experiments. The expected results are experimentally validated models on these three levels for the two different implementations.