Composite Materials Research Progress

138
Yuanxin Zhou, Hassan Mahfuz, Vijaya Rangari et al.
Manufacturing of Nano-phased Carbon Prepreg Unidirectional Laminates
The process of unidirectional laminate fabrication started with online prepregging. By this it
means that when eight layers of the manufactured prepregs were hoop wound on the rotating
foam mandrel during prepreg manufacturing, the remaining tow was cut and the mandrel was
removed from the filament winding machine. During prepreg stacking, care was taken to
place tows without allowing the previous layer to dry. The prepregs on the cylinder was then
longitudinally cut open into a rectangular sheet as shown in Figure 7. These rectangular
sheets were arranged in a compression molding setup by putting symmetric layers of plastic
film, bleeder cloth and teflon on the top and bottom. The whole setup was then placed in
Tetrahedron MTP press compression molder as shown in Figure 8. Mold temperature was
ramped to get 350 0 F while the mold pressure was kept as 40 Psi and consolidated for about 4
hours to obtain a 2mm thick SiC-carbon-epoxy nanophased unidirectional laminate (as shown
in Figure 9). A typical consolidation cycle is shown in Figure 10.
Figure 7. Schematic of unidirectional laminate preparation.
Figure 8. Compression molder.