Knitted Textiles Increase Durability of Composites for Automobiles & Aerospace
A team of University of Michigan MCubed collaborators are exploring the use of knitted textiles to further the form and durability for composites used in automobiles, airplanes, and space exploration. MCubed is a two-year seed-funding program designed to empower interdisciplinary teams of University of Michigan faculty. The program minimizes the time between idea conception and research results by providing immediate startup funds for novel projects.
Transcript
00:00:01 So the project I am part of deals with fabric.We came up with this idea that we could knit our way into all kinds of structures like bicycles, hoods for cars, parts of airplanes etc. The textile aspect of the composite that's quite unique that's one of the avenues that we're pursuing. How does that then play out into making a composite. The knit provides a lot more flexibility which is very different from a weave because you can have the one area that super rigid that needs to be rigid and then you can have another area which is
00:00:40 much more flexible because it needs to be flexible. One important property of composites is toughness. If you've seen these Indy 500 racers, Formula One racers you've seen cars crashing at ,you know, really high speeds but then you see the driver just walking away, The reason is that when these things break they break rather gracefully they absorb a lot of energies. It's sort of diffusely cracking. It beats most metals very easily. Muffled voice: Alright time to start it up!
00:01:15 Sounds of air compressor Despite the fact that we look like a strange kind of team and this is not the typical thing that get funded MCubed funding allows us to demonstrate that this actually has legs. MCubed is an initiative at the University of Michigan that tries too help faculty at the University to identify collaborators to nurture a research project that span multiple departments. MCubed allowed us to make the hypothesis and give us the time to research its usefulness and its application. I mean honestly
00:01:56 we've certainly learned a lot about what has been done, what hasn't been done, what direction we should head in. There are already carbon fiber reinforced composites and other braided textile composites that are used for structural forms but they tend to be labor intensive. With knitted and certain types are braids and woven materials you can produce the backbone very quickly. If you can also infuse it very quickly, which can be done, you can produce very intricate structural forms rigidly for actual load-bearing
00:02:31 purposes and then you can do it rather cost effectively. There's no waste, there's no cutting, there's no sewing the thing which is actually a fully three-dimensional structure can be produced directly off the machine. We're getting several desirable effects using one material: light weight, producability and the fact that they are highly damage tolerant and very crash worthy. I think it's a matter of time before people realized that this is the material of choice in the near future.