Components made of Carbon Fibers Reinforced Plactis (CFRP) are usually built-up by stacking sheets on a mould, prior to them undergoing a curing. This process generally produces a large amount of waste due to the unused cut portions of the raw sheets that are usually seen as useless and therefore trashed.
With rising concerns around efficiency and raw material’s costs, several approaches have been developed in the past few years to reuse the scrap from manufacturing processes, some of which with interesting results. Researchers aim to combine together in various ways scraps of pre-impregnated raw material, in order to develop new materials, usually with worse performances than the original material, albeit still worth using.
The common drawback of such techniques is the difficult definition of mechanical properties due to the unpredictability of the fibers’ orientation length into the new compound. This project aims to fill this gap, proposing to introduce self-sensing capabilities into the new material to strengthen its reliability and give a decisive impulse to their wider usage.
To achieve this purpose piezo-ceramic particles will be embedded within the composite material as real-time sensor, and we will exploit carbon fibers as electrodes to collect and transmit the signal generated during service loadings.
The material thus altered will be intrinsically equipped with self-monitoring capabilities without compromising stiffness or strength of the hosting material.