LSDG

Lightweight Structures Dynamics Group

Graphene


The future of aeronautic industry depends on reducing time and cost of manufacturing process as well as increasing manufacturing rate. RTM and Resin Infusion represent two main promising composite material manufacturing technologies that meet these challenges.

New improvements in composite structures have to be seeksought in order to improve their competitiveness. The use of Graphene Related Material (GRM) for enhancing them could represent an important advance in order to improve their impact vulnerability and performance of RTM composites.
In this work epoxy resin doped with different GRM were used to manufacture CFRP structures by RTM. A wide experimental characterization campaign was performed in order to ascertain the impact properties improvement of the laminates produced. Experimental campaign has been divided in three levels: resin coupons GRM doped characterization (Level 1), laminates coupons GRM doped characterization (Level 2) and representative aeronautic structure GRM doped testing campaign (Level 3). Resin coupons were tested at by quasistatic and at high strain rate (SHPB) experimental  conditions to evaluate the GRM performance. Concerning laminates, Double Cantilever Beam (DCB), Low Velocity Impact (LVI) and Compression After Impact (CAI) tests were performed. Regarding experimental methodology, ASTM and AITM standard were followed, also new measuring techniques were used as 3D High Speed DIC