An integral design and manufacturing concept for crash resistant textile and long-fibre reinforced polypropylene structural components

Abstract For the design of crash resistant structures for automotive applications, mainly metallic materials are currently considered. However, the advanced specific energy absorption capacity and a high lightweight potential qualifies fiber and textile reinforced thermoplastic composites for such components. With a load adapted material design as well as an efficient manufacturing concept these properties can be exploited to a full extend. A seat pan is chosen as an exemplary structure to illustrate the four main aspects of the investigations: evaluation of glass fiber polypropylene composite configurations; development of a manufacturing and process chain; crash and impact experiments on structural level and numerical modelling strategy. Hybrid yarn based textiles, such as a commercially available 2/2-twill fabric and novel multi-layered flat bed weft-knitted fabrics have been considered to be combined with a long-fibre reinforced thermoplastic material (LFT, cutting length of 25 mm) for complexly loaded sections like ribbings. A special emphasis is set on a similar to mass-production manufacturing process. A fully automated integral hot pressing process has been developed, where an automated handling system places the conglomerate of extruded LFT-material and preheated hybrid yarn textile in a fast-stroke press, achieving process cycles of 45 s. Finally, the structural evaluation under crash loading conditions is compared against numerical results.