08/03/2022
By Sokny Long

The Francis College of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation proposal defense in Mechanical Engineering on the "Effects of Manufacturing on the Entanglement of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Composites.”

Ph.D. Candidate: Mathew Schey
Date: Tuesday, August 16, 2021
Time: Noon to 2 p.m. EDT
Location: DAN 220 and virtual via zoom

All interested students and faculty members are invited to attend the defense in person or via remote online access. Those interested in attending should contact Mathew_Schey@student.uml.edu and committee advisor, Scott_Stapleton@uml.edu, at least 24 hours prior to the defense to request access to the meeting.

Committee Chair: Scott Stapleton, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, UMass Lowell (Advisor)

Dissertation Committee Members:

  • Mariana Maiaru, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, UMass Lowell
  • Tibor Beke, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Mathematical Sciences, UMass Lowell
  • David Mollenhauer, Ph.D., Principal Materials Engineer, United States Air Force Research Lab

Abstract:

Carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRPs) have become an industry standard in most applications requiring high strength to weight ratios. CFRPs have been manufactured in a multitude of ways, leaving manufacturers with a certain degree of control over cost and final strength. One consequence of the manufacturing is entanglement within the fibrous microstructure. Entanglement occurs when neighboring carbon fibers become non-parallel to each other, or off-axis from their intended orientation. It is thought that the presence of entanglement has a significant influence on the property scatter of composite materials. Therefore, the proper quantification of the microstructural features of carbon fibers is necessary for the advancement of microstructural modeling. The proposed work presents 1) a novel cluster metric which detects fiber bundles within a CFRP in an automated way, 2) and experiment isolating the entanglement within three composite microstructures when all other manufacturing parameters remain constant, and 3) a survey of manufacturing methods to understand which metrics differ and which remain the same across all methods. In this work, a case is made for the use of these metrics to link a fibrous microstructure back to the manufacturing process that created it. Studying these metrics could provide a basis for discussion of the differences in manufacturing methods and their effects on the microstructure, as well as provide a mathematical description of the way real fibers are organized with the potential for informing artificial microstructural generation.

All interested students and faculty members are invited to attend the defense.