Innovative approach to mass production of fiber metal laminate sheets

ABSTRACT

Although, lightweight composite structures like sandwich panels and fiber metal laminates (FMLs) are greatly used as a superior material to produce modern structures to provide a substitutive item for monolithic metallic parts, but still there are some challenges in their forming process. There are some inherent limitations for forming FML parts. Also, because the strain of the fibers is limited, conventional approaches are not appropriate for forming complex-shaped laminate parts. Understanding the material behavior during the forming process is critical to find a new technique for relatively intricate and smaller FML parts. To understand the material behavior to present a new forming method, the finite element software and experiments are utilized and the thinning of layer thickness, stress distributions in different layers, and the fiber orientation are studied. Blanks made of intermittent glass fabric/fibers and Al 2024-O alloy sheets. The behavior of the material was appraised utilizing ABAQUS according to Hill yield criteria and then evaluated with the empirical outcomes. Results exhibited that FML parts manufactured by utilizing multilayer hydroforming can enhance the FML applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Composite
• Glare
• hemisphere
• hydroforming
• laminate
• lightweight
• rupture
• wrinkling

Additional information

Funding

The authors greatly appreciate the financial support from National Science and Technology Major Project with Grant No.2014ZX04002041 and National Science Foundation of China with Grant No.51675029.