PhD candidate
Project: Dimensional Stability Analysis for Compression Resin Transfer Moulding with Highly Reactive Thermosets.
LinkedIn leonardo.barcenasgomez [at] mail.mcgill.ca (Mail)
Supervisor: Prof Pascal Hubert
The Corporate Fuel Average Efficiency (CAFE) regulation requires average fuel consumption of cars to increase from 6.2 L/100 km to 4.3 L/100 km by 2025. One solution to reach this target is vehicle light weighting. The transportation industry is showing a strong interest in using high performance polymer composites to achieve weight reductions that cannot be achieved with metals. However, the cycle times of the traditional composite manufacturing processes are not adapted to the production of parts in large series. Recently, the development of fast curing thermoset resins has opened the door to the mass production of composite parts using variants of resin transfer moulding (RTM) and compression prepreg processes. The Research Centre of the National Research Council (NRC) has recently developed improved variants of RTM and have named this process SNAP RTM (Figure 1) with the use of rapid cure resins, to evoke the need for Short Novel Affordable Processes for composite manufacturing, achieving the 2 – 5 minutes cycle time targeted by the automotive industry for the production of large series.
Few works on the manufacture of composite parts for land transport (automobile, trucks, buses) were conducted with these fast resins in an industrial environment in Quebec and even in North America. The reactivity of these resins creates manufacturing and quality challenges for moulded parts, parts design and tooling. The existing process simulation tools must also be modified to take into account the dynamic behavior of these resins and new physical models of these materials must be developed. Dimensional distortion on composite materials is inherently produced by the residual stresses generated by the manufacturing process conditions. The final shape of the composite component depends on non-uniform resin flow, tooling effects, shrinkage and cure gradients. The cure gradients are more extensive with the use highly reactive thermosets. This gradient produces a non uniform evolution of the mechanical properties of the composite structure. Distortion is expected from these degree of cure gradients. Figure 2 shows a Resin Transfer Moulding simulation with the expected degree of cure gradient on highly reactive thermosets.
This project aims to solve these manufacturing problems, to develop robust, fast and efficient processes for manufacturing high-performance composite parts, to develop tools to model and predict these manufacturing processes and to validate these solutions with the manufacture of a composite demonstrator relevant to the land transportation industry, to minimize the risks of adoption of these composite materials by the Quebec and Canadian industry. The project team is composed of experienced researchers, engineers and technicians of the Automotive and Surface transportation Research Centre of the National Research Council (NRC), the Structures and Composite Materials Laboratory at McGill University, CTA and composite part manufacturers: Prevost Car/Volvo Group, Soucy Composites, NanoXplore, Texonic, Norplex-Micarta, IND Experts, Teijin, NovationTech and AOC Aliancys.
Publications
Alejandro E. Rodríguez-Sánchez, Elías Ledesma-Orozco and Leonardo Barcenas. A numerical study of the effect of the thickness parameter on machining distortion for aluminum alloy plates. Engineering Research Express, Volume 3, Number 3, 2021. Available here.
Leonardo Barcenas, Elias Ledesma-Orozco, Sjoerd Van-der-Veen, Francisco Reveles-Arredondo, E. Alejandro Rodríguez-Sánchez. An optimization of part distortion for a structural aircraft wing rib: an industrial workflow approach. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology, Volume 28, 2020, Pages 15-23, ISSN 1755-5817. Available here.
Leonardo Barcenas. An Industrial Workflow to Minimize Part Distortion for Machining of Large Monolithic Components in Aerospace Industry. University of Guanajuato. Mechanical Engineering Department. Thesis Report, 2017.
Sjoerd O. Van Der Veen, Leonardo Barcenas, Hugo D. Groeneveld, Vishal Bhoelai and Jos Sinke. High-Energy Hydroforming for the Aerospace Industry. Session: Fatigue & Fracture. AIAA SciTech 2016-0157. Available here.