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Innovations In Aligned And Overmolded Long Fiber Thermoplastic Composites, Shailesh P. Alwekar
Innovations In Aligned And Overmolded Long Fiber Thermoplastic Composites, Shailesh P. Alwekar
Doctoral Dissertations
Long fiber thermoplastic (LFT) composite materials are increasingly used in high performance lightweight automotive, sporting, and industrial applications. LFT composites are processed with extrusion-compression molding (ECM) and/or injection molding (IM). Melt extrusion offers unique opportunities to align long fibers in a thermoplastic polymer melt. The properties of LFT materials are highly influenced by processing techniques which leads to different porosity content, fiber length distribution, and fiber orientation distribution. Hence, it is important to understand the various LFT processing techniques and their effect on mechanical, thermal, and microscopic properties.
The fundamental process-property relationships in LFT composites are investigated in this dissertation. …