Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Centrifugal Casting is used for making cylindrical, hollow shapes such as tanks, pipes and poles. Chopped strand mat is placed into a hollow, cylindrical mold, or continuous roving is chopped and directed onto the inside walls of the mold. Resin is applied to the inside of the rotating mold.
Compression Molding
Compression molding is done with matched metal molds utilizing sheet-molding compound (SMC), bulk-molding compound (BMC), or preform mat. A weighed charge of SMC or BMC, or a preform of glass reinforcement shaped to the mold is placed on a press ranging in size from 300 to 4,000 tons. Resin is added with the preform while SMC and BMC contain all components including fiber, resin, fillers, catalyst etc. Heat and pressure is applied, with temperature ranges of 225 to 325 oF. and 150 to 1,000 psi pressure required to cure parts. Cycles can range from less than one to five minutes. Typical thermoset resins used in compression molded parts are polyesters, vinyl esters, epoxies, and phenolics. Compression molded products vary from dinnerware, trays, buttons, appliance housings, large containers, electrical, to recreational vehicle body panels such as snow mobiles, and jetskis.
Autoclave Molding
Autoclave molding is a modification of pressure-bag and vacuum-bag molding. This advanced composite process produces denser, void free moldings because higher heat and pressure are used for curing. It is widely used in the aerospace industry to fabricate high strength/weight ratio parts from preimpregnated high strength fibers for
aircraft, spacecraft and missiles. Autoclaves are essentially heated pressure vessels usually equipped with vacuum systems into which the bagged lay-up on the mold is taken for the cure cycle. Curing pressures are generally in the range of 50 to 100 psi and cure cycles normally involve many hours. The method accommodates higher temperature matrix resins such as epoxies, having higher properties than conventional resins. Autoclave size limits part size.
Pultrusion Strongwell brings unmatched capacity, technology, engineering, developmental and overall general pultrusion firepower to its customers by producing hundreds of thousands of feet of pultruded fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) shapes every day! The unique advantages possible with FRP have enabled pultruded profiles to penetrate markets where other materials could not meet the design or end use requirements efficiently. The Pultrusion Process Pultrusion is a manufacturing process for producing continuous lengths of reinforced polymer structural shapes with constant cross-sections. Raw materials are a liquid resin mixture (containing resin, fillers and specialized additives) and flexible textile reinforcing fibers. The process involves pulling these raw materials (rather than pushing, as is the case in extrusion) through a heated steel forming die using a continuous pulling device.
The reinforcement materials are in continuous forms such as rolls of fiberglass mat and doffs of fiberglass roving. As the reinforcements are saturated with the resin mixture ("wet-out") in the resin bath and pulled through the die, the gelation, or hardening, of the resin is initiated by the heat from the die and a rigid, cured profile is formed that corresponds to the shape of the die. While pultrusion machine design varies with part geometry, the basic pultrusion process concept is described in the schematic shown below.
Watch the Pultrusion Process The creels position the reinforcements for subsequent feeding into the guide plate. The reinforcement must be located properly within the composite and this is the function of the reinforcement guides. The resin bath saturates (wets out) the reinforcement with a solution containing the resin, fillers, pigment, and catalyst plus any other additives required. The interior of the resin impregnator is carefully designed to optimize the wet-out of the reinforcement. On exiting the resin bath, the composite is in a flat sheet form. The preformer is an array of tooling which squeezes away excess resin as the product is moving forward and gently shapes the materials prior to entering the forming and curing die. In the forming and curing die, the thermosetting reaction is heat activated (energy is primarily supplied electrically) and the composite is cured (hardened). On exiting the die, it is necessary to cool the hot part before it is gripped by the pull blocks (made of durable urethane foam) to prevent cracking and/or deformation by the pull blocks.
Strongwell uses two distinct pulling systems, one that is a caterpillar counter-rotating type and the other a hand-over-hand reciprocating type to pull the cured profile to the saw for cutting to length. In certain applications an RF (radio frequency wave generator) unit is used to preheat the composite before entering the die. When in use, the RF heater is positioned between the preformer and the die.