Due to the weight savings made the vehicle’s payload is boosted by almost 50% compared to similar vehicles meaning more goods can be carried per vehicle, per journey. While significant improvements in fuel economy too, thanks to the aerodynamic technologies applied to the design.

The launch is the result of more than 10 years of research by British engineering firm Penso and a £16.3 million investment – half from Penso and half from government matched-funding via the Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) and Innovate UK. This has helped to fund the installation of a flexible automated robot assembly line housed in a brand new 50,000 square foot facility.

From the outset, we knew carbon fibre was going to be the solution, but we also knew others had tried this approach previously, and because it was eye-wateringly expensive – partly due to the lengthy and complex production process to manufacture each part – the costs simply hadn’t stacked up.

In order to get the costs down the company constructed the bodies using the same sandwich panel technology they had used to create a press formed composite rail door for the London Underground. By moving away from manufacturing parts in an autoclave, and press forming the panels instead, they could cut the time it takes to construct each part from hours to minutes.

The newly created robot assembly line could create a finished body every 42 minutes, much quicker than the two-weeks a typical manual build takes with carbon fibre composites. The new van bodies have a 10-year lifespan (and structural warranty) and can be moved to a new chassis after 5 years, which makes them compatible with future electric and hybrid vehicles.

With these savings in fuel, labour and operating costs, Penso estimates that a typical supermarket fleet could save up to £6,700 per van, per year. Asda will be putting these vans on the road throughout the country focussing on areas where drivers have increased mileage to reach customers in remote areas such as parts of the East Coast.

This latest move is part of Asda’s commitment to making carbon reduction a priority across the business as it looks to tackle climate change. The retailer has already reduced its energy usage by 20% in stores and uses the same amount of energy as it did in 2005, despite its estate being 200% bigger.

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“Frontal polymerisation doesn’t use an autoclave at all, so it doesn’t require that huge upfront investment,” said Bliss Professor Philippe Geubelle in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the U of I. “It’s a chemical reaction sustained by the release of heat as the front propagates. It can save a lot of energy and it generates much less carbon dioxide, so that’s an environmental benefit.”

Geubelle said they began comparing the two methods by looking at the thermo-chemical equations in order to model the two polymerisation processes. In that way, they could compare the methods for a variety of composite materials, and particularly, the time duration each method takes to manufacture the same part.

“The key contribution from the theoretical point of view is we’ve rewritten the reaction-diffusion equations to extract the two most important non-dimensional parameters,” Geubelle said. “Using just these two parameters allowed us to look at a wide range of chemical parameters, such as the activation energy and the heat of reaction, and at the impact of the initial temperature of the resin.”

Geubelle said this method helped to compare the composite manufacturing processes based on bulk and frontal polymerisation in terms of the time it takes to manufacture a part. The study found that there were instances when one or the other was faster.

“Imagine you want to make something that is one meter long. Frontal polymerisation will be able to do complete the task before bulk polymerisation starts to kick in,” Geubelle said. “On the other hand, if you want to make something that is 10 meters long, then bulk polymerisation may actually take place before the front reaches the other end of the part. It’s the competition between these two processes that we analysed in this study.”

He went on to say there are several ways to speed up the process for frontal polymerization: start the front at both ends so it goes twice as fast, or heat it from the bottom by using a heated panel beneath it. “That process is so fast, we refer to it as flash curing,” Geubelle said, “but it does use more energy than for a single front.”

Manufacturing composite parts using frontal polymerization instead of bulk polymerization has a lot of advantages.

“With frontal polymerisation, you don’t need the large capital investment of the autoclave, making it a very attractive option,” Geubelle said. “The time it takes to cure a composite part is also much shorter and the environmental impact is substantially reduced.”

The study, “Frontal vs. bulk polymerization of fibre-reinforced polymer-matrix composites,” was written by S. Vyas, X. Zhang, E. Goli, and P. H. Geubelle. It is published in Composites Science and Technology.

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Each car starts with the steel tub of an original Mustang body which is then fitted with all-new carbon fibre body panels. A 3D digital model is made of the car and a five-axis CNC machine cuts the moulds, and then plugs and panels are pulled using aerospace-grade pre-preg carbon fibre.

The moulded carbon fibre body panels are cured using an in-house autoclave. The result is the world’s first officially-licensed Shelby Mustang that is lighter and stronger than an all-steel body and has perfect carbon fibre weave alignment.

Since 1998, Mr Shelby believed that carbon fibre would be the future of American sports car manufacturing. We believe the introduction of a carbon-fibre GT500 Mustang and Cobra is a natural next step in the evolution of these iconic vehicles.

 Neil Cummings, Co-CEO of Carroll Shelby International

GT500CR models are available with several engine options, ranging from a 490-horsepower Ford Performance Gen 3 5.0L Coyote crate engine up to a 900-horsepower, a hand-built 427-cubic-inch engine with an intercooled ProCharger supercharger. All Shelby GT500CR models are equipped with a Tremec five-speed manual transmission and a stainless-steel MagnaFlow performance exhaust.

According to Classic Restorations, SpeedKore has 3D-scanned a complete GT500CR and is currently in production making a prototype with the first vehicle scheduled to be finished in June.

The post The 1967 Shelby GT500 Mustang is Making a Carbon Fibre Comeback appeared first on Composites Today.

Part of the Air Force 2030 Science and Technology strategy includes the deployment of low-cost Unmanned Aerial Systems in mass to assist in future near-peer engagements. In order to realise this vision, new manufacturing strategies need to be identified which can support the rapid manufacturing of high-quality aerospace components at costs that are lower than what is currently available using legacy manufacturing processes.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Manufacturing and Industrial Technologies Division and the contractor team of Cornerstone Research Group, A&P Technology and Spintech LLC, conducted research to quantify the benefits of replacing legacy manufacturing processes with novel processes for the fabrication of an 11-foot long, S-shaped engine inlet duct.

The legacy fabrication process for the inlet duct consists of composite material pre-impregnated with a synthetic resin, applied by hand, to a multi-piece steel mandrel. The mandrel is packaged and placed in an autoclave for processing. An autoclave is essentially a heated pressure vessel which supplies heat to activate resin curing and pressure to ensure there is minimal absorbency in the fully cured composite part.

The approach replaces the hand-applied composite prepreg with an automated over-braid process which applies dry fibre to a mandrel. The very heavy multi-piece steel mandrel was replaced with a light-weight single-piece shape-memory polymer mandrel and the dry braided carbon fibre was processed with low-cost epoxy resin using a vacuum-assisted resin transfer moulding process.

One of the primary goals of this program is to understand the part cost and production time benefits from introducing the new tooling and processing solutions.

The team completed element analysis finalisation of the over-braid architecture, fabrication of a shape memory polymer-forming tool and construction of the SMP mandrel that will serve as the tool during the preform over-braid process.

We believe that the introduction of a reusable shape memory polymer mandrel together with the automated over-braid process and an oven based VARTM composite cure will lead to significant cost and cycle time reductions

 Mr. Craig Neslen, manufacturing lead for the Low Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology Initiative

Because of inlet duct geometrical complexity, multiple iterations were necessary to optimise the over-braid machine settings and thus minimise composite material wrinkling. A total of four inlet ducts will be fabricated and legacy part cost and production time will be compared to the new design.

The final inlet duct will be delivered to the government for further integration into the Aerospace System’s Directorate’s complementary airframe design and manufacturing program. Personnel at the Aerospace Vehicles Division will conduct static ground testing of the integrated braided fuselage and inlet duct structure.

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Now MIT engineers have developed a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of aeroplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines.

The researchers detail their new method in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.

If you’re making a primary structure like a fuselage or wing, you need to build a pressure vessel, or autoclave, the size of a two- or three-story building, which itself requires time and money to pressurize. These things are massive pieces of infrastructure. Now we can make primary structure materials without autoclave pressure, so we can get rid of all that infrastructure. Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT

Wardle’s co-authors on the paper are lead author and MIT postdoc Jeonyoon Lee, and Seth Kessler of Metis Design Corporation, an aerospace structural health monitoring company based in Boston.

Out of the oven, into a blanket

In 2015, Lee led the team, along with another member of Wardle’s lab, in creating a method to make aerospace-grade composites without requiring an oven to fuse the materials together. Instead of placing layers of material inside an oven to cure, the researchers essentially wrapped them in an ultrathin film of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). When they applied an electric current to the film, the CNTs, like a nanoscale electric blanket, quickly generated heat, causing the materials within to cure and fuse together.

With this out-of-oven, or OoO, technique, the team was able to produce composites as strong as the materials made in conventional aeroplane manufacturing ovens, using only 1 per cent of the energy.

The researchers next looked for ways to make high-performance composites without the use of large, high-pressure autoclaves — building-sized vessels that generate high enough pressures to press materials together, squeezing out any voids, or air pockets, at their interface.

Researchers including Wardle’s group have explored “out-of-autoclave,” or OoA, techniques to manufacture composites without using the huge machines. But most of these techniques have produced composites where nearly 1 per cent of the material contains voids, which can compromise a material’s strength and lifetime. In comparison, aerospace-grade composites made in autoclaves are of such high quality that any voids they contain are negligible and not easily measured.

Straw pressure

Part of Wardle’s work focuses on developing nanoporous networks — ultrathin films made from aligned, microscopic material such as carbon nanotubes, that can be engineered with exceptional properties, including colour, strength, and electrical capacity. The researchers wondered whether these nanoporous films could be used in place of giant autoclaves to squeeze out voids between two material layers, as unlikely as that may seem.

A thin film of carbon nanotubes is somewhat like a dense forest of trees, and the spaces between the trees can function like thin nanoscale tubes or capillaries. A capillary such as a straw can generate pressure based on its geometry and its surface energy, or the material’s ability to attract liquids or other materials.

The researchers tested their idea in the lab by growing films of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes using a technique they previously developed, then laying the films between layers of materials that are typically used in the autoclave-based manufacturing of primary aircraft structures. They wrapped the layers in a second film of carbon nanotubes, which they applied an electric current to heat it up. They observed that as the materials heated and softened in response, they were pulled into the capillaries of the intermediate CNT film.

The resulting composite lacked voids, similar to aerospace-grade composites that are produced in an autoclave. The researchers subjected the composites to strength tests, attempting to push the layers apart, the idea being that voids, if present, would allow the layers to separate more easily.

The team will next look for ways to scale up the pressure-generating CNT film. In their experiments, they worked with samples measuring several centimetres wide — large enough to demonstrate that nanoporous networks can pressurize materials and prevent voids from forming. To make this process viable for manufacturing entire wings and fuselages, researchers will have to find ways to manufacture CNT and other nanoporous films at a much larger scale.

He plans also to explore different formulations of nanoporous films, engineering capillaries of varying surface energies and geometries, to be able to pressurize and bond other high-performance materials.

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