pps proceeding - Abstract Preview
pps proceeding
Symposium: S10 - Reactive Processing
Oral Presentation
 
 

High-speed Reactive Processing System for Polyamide-6 CFRTP Automotive Roof Cross Member Manufacturing

Kim Sangwoo (1), Park Teahoon (1), Lee Jungwan (1), Um Moon-Kwang (1), Yi Jinwoo (1)*

(1) Korea Institute of Materials Science - Gyeongsangnam-do - Korea

The carbon fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) is a promising candidate for industries as a high-strength material having desired light-weight. Especially, there are tremendous interests towards automotive parts consisted of CFRP to increase fuel efficiency for clean energy and environment. However so far manufacturing cost of the CFRP, consisted of thermoset like epoxy resin, has been too expensive to be applied to mass production due to time- and cost-consuming curing process. However, thermoplastic CFRP does not require the curing process, which reduces manufacturing cost and cycle time. Also it can be welded or recycled upon melting. Despite the advantages of the thermoplastic CFRP, it is hard to produce with existing resin transfer moulding (RTM) process, owing to the high viscosity of thermoplastic polymer. Therefore, reactive processing has been suggested, where the low viscosity monomer melts instead of polymer melts are injected into carbon fibre fabrics, and following in-situ polymerization enables to produce the thermoplastic CFRP. In this study, our research team developed the reactive processing system for automotive roof cross member parts consisted of carbon fiber-reinforced thermoplastic polyamide-6 (PA-6) composites. The in-situ anionic ring-opening polymerization of ε-caprolactam was utilized for PA-6 matrix synthesis. For PA-6 CFRTP automotive roof cross member manufacturing, resin flow of melts during reactive processing was analyzed and the results were applied to metal mold design. And the processing system was investigated in terms of reactive processing kinetics, recycle/repair, and commercialization.