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Topic Name: 'Nanostitching' could lead to much stronger airplane skins, more
Category: Aeronautical
Research persons: Brian L. Wardle
Location: Cambridge, United States
Details
MIT engineers are using carbon nanotubes only billionths of a meter thick to
stitch together aerospace materials in work that could make airplane skins and
other products some 10 times stronger at a nominal increase in cost.
Moreover, advanced composites reinforced with nanotubes are also more than
one million times more electrically conductive than their counterparts without
nanotubes, meaning aircraft built with such materials would have greater
protection against damage from lightning, said Brian L. Wardle, the Charles
Stark Draper Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics.
Wardle is lead author of a theoretical paper on the new nanotube-reinforced
composites that will appear in the Journal of Composite Materials (http://jcm.sagepub.com).
He also described the work as keynote speaker at a Society of Plastics Engineers
conference this week.
The advanced materials currently used for many aerospace applications are
composed of layers, or plies, of carbon fibers that in turn are held together
with a polymer glue. But that glue can crack and otherwise result in the
carbon-fiber plies coming apart. As a result, engineers have explored a variety
of ways to reinforce the interface between the layers by stitching, braiding,
weaving or pinning them together.
All of these processes, however, are problematic because the relatively large
stitches or pins penetrate and damage the carbon-fiber plies themselves. "And
those fiber plies are what make composites so strong," Wardle said.
So Wardle wondered whether it would make sense to reinforce the plies in
advanced composites with nanotubes aligned perpendicular to the carbon-fiber
plies. Using computer models of how such a material would fracture, "we
convinced ourselves that reinforcing with nanotubes should work far better than
all other approaches," Wardle said. His team went on to develop processing
techniques for creating the nanotubes and for incorporating them into existing
aerospace composites, work that was published last year in two separate
journals.
How does nanostitching work? The polymer glue between two carbon-fiber layers
is heated, becoming more liquid-like. Billions of nanotubes positioned
perpendicular to each carbon-fiber layer are then sucked up into the glue on
both sides of each layer. Because the nanotubes are 1000 times smaller than the
carbon fibers, they don't detrimentally affect the much larger carbon fibers,
but instead fill the spaces around them, stitching the layers together.
"So we're putting the strongest fibers known to humankind [the nanotubes] in
the place where the composite is weakest, and where they're needed most," Wardle
said. He noted that these dramatic improvements can be achieved with nanotubes
comprising less than one percent of the mass of the overall composite. In
addition, he said, the nanotubes should add only a few percent to the cost of
the composite, "while providing substantial improvements in bulk multifunctional
properties."
About The Researcher :
Brian L. Wardle
Charles Stark Draper Assistant Professor
of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Professor Wardle's
research interests are in the area of
structures and materials, primarily focusing on aerospace applications. Current
research areas are composite systems, active materials, structural health
monitoring (SHM), and power-conversion devices at the MEMS scale. Topics of
interest to him include: structural mechanics, durability, advanced material
systems, safety/reliability and performance of structural systems,
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), structural health monitoring and
nanocomposites. Professor Wardle's
educational activities cover experimentation
and modeling of materials and structures
Brian Wardle received his Bachelor of Science
degree in
Aerospace Engineering from The Pennsylvania
State University in 1992. He went on to attend MIT where he earned his
SM in 1995 and his
Ph.D in 1998 in the Department of Aeronautics
and Astronautics.
In 1999, Dr. Wardle worked as a private
engineering consultant as well as serving as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT.
From 1999 to 2003, he was with
McKinsey & Company as an Associate and
Engagement Manager assisting leading firms on topics of strategy and operations.
In April of 2003, Dr. Wardle returned to MIT to accept an appointment as the
Boeing Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and
Astronautics.
Contact information of
Brian L. Wardle:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 33-314
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Telephone: (617) 252-1539
Fax: (617) 253-0361
wardle@mit.edu
Administrative Assistant:
Mark Prendergast
Phone :617-253-6339
| Tags: |
carbon nanotubes - airplane skins - advanced composites - carbon-fiber plies - nanostitching - |
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