When you are setting out to design a part to be manufactured from laminated composite material, there are many specific considerations that will help make the outcome more successful. Like any material, there are things that work great, things that work ok and things that look like they might be ok but actually are a huge pain in the ass! And lots of gray areas!
This section is here to help you make decisions early that guide your composite part down easy street – where it costs what you think it should and doesn’t break and doesn’t make your fabricator wish you’d go away forever and never come back.
Topics:
- Questions to Ask First
- Composite Manufacturing Methods
- Introduction to Types of Tooling
- Basic Numbers and Calculations for Composites
- About Thermoset Resins
- Introduction to Cored Structures
- Composites Details: Edges, Holes and Joints
TBD / In Progress:
- Thermoset vs Thermoplastic
- Choose Your Infusion: RTM, VARTM, RTM Light… WTF?
- Do You Really Need Carbon?
- Economics of Prototyping vs. Production
I’m no engineer and really not much of designer – but I’ve worked with lots of them and I pretend to be one at work. My feeling is that design is really just predicting the future. Fortunately with physical items and materials, there is reliable consistency from one observation to the next, so experience and data can help you make good decisions that will do what you expect. There is a lot of data on composite processes and engineering, but it’s all spread out and owned by different people and stored or presented in different formats.
EC! is meant to help with the bigger broader decisions – like what overall material or process to use – not how many plies of what material to put where. If you nail the big picture stuff, the details get easier to deal with! Also, hire a qualified engineer.