Abstract
Glass fiber-reinforced polymer composites have promising applications in infrastructure, marine, and automotive industries due to their low cost, high specific stiffness/strength, durability, and corrosion resistance. Polyurethane (PU) resin system is widely used as matrix material in glass fiber-reinforced composites due to their superior mechanical behavior and higher impact strength. Glass fiber-reinforced PU composites are often manufactured using pultrusion process, due to shorter pot life of PU resin system. In this study, E-glass/PU composites are manufactured using a low-cost vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding process. A novel, one-part PU thermoset resin system with a longer pot life is adopted in this study. Tensile, flexure, and impact tests are conducted on both the thermoset PU neat resin system and E-glass/PU composites. A three-dimensional finite element model is developed in a commercial finite element code to simulate the impact behavior of E-glass/PU composite for three different energy levels. Finite element model is validated by comparing it with experimental results.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Mr Craig Snyder, Dr Usama Younes, and Dr John Hayes from Bayer Material Science for their help.