Learning Forum

[Ashish Khemka]

Can you give some examples of composite materials and their applications?

[Samir Kadam]

There are so many uses today in almost all industries. Carbon fiber, which is very stiff, embedded in a resin or thermoplastic binder or matrix is commonly used in high performance structures like aircraft wings, racing bicycles, Formula 1 racing components.  

[Pankaj Rajput]

You will also find fiberglass, which is not a stiff as carbon fiber, but is much cheaper and it is used in many structures from wind turbine blades to surf boards.

[Samir Kadam]

Honeycomb sandwich composite structures have been widely used to create stiff panels. A great everyday example of something similar to honeycomb composites is corrugated cardboard. Look at most shipping boxes and you will see it is made of an outside and inside layer of cardboard with a zig-zag shaped cardboard sandwiched in between. This positions the outside and inside layer further from the neutral axis, so in bending, the cardboard is stiff, but very light to not add weight to the shipment. 😊

[David Mercier]

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First of all, it is important to distinguish composites and architectured materials, which form the family of hybrid materials. Composites are a mix of multiple materials and it's often a matrix + reinforcements. Then architectured materials are combinations of two or more materials or of materials and space. Here a very good reference about this topic : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359646212002965

If you want to learn more in general about hybrid materials, the Ansys Grata EduPack is a very good pedagogic software. Below screeshots of the material database with hybrids highlighted and of the Synthesizer tool, which helps to design manually some composites and architectured materials and to estimate their properties, in order to compare to reference materials, like you can see in the last Ashby graphic. https://www.ansys.com/products/materials/granta-edupack

Finally, here a webinar about usage of composites for railway lightweighting: https://www.ansys.com/resource-center/webinar/transportation-railway-lightweighting

Or this webinar on how to model analytically and numerically hybrid materials: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345978642_Modelling_of_Hybrids_Materials

Figure 1. Young's Modulus vs Density Chart. Material Family Chart - Chart created using CES EduPack 2019, ANSYS Granta © 2020 Granta Design

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