The compaction behaviour of un-cured prepregs

This study has characterised the compaction behaviour of toughened prepregs which is needed to better understand and optimise the composite manufacturing process. It aimed to cover conditions from all the stages of advanced composite manufacturing: fibre deposition by automatic fibre placement machines, hot or room temperature debulking, and consolidation in autoclave. During these operations the material experiences a wide range of processing parameters: pressure, load rate, temperatures, and boundary constraints. In these conditions toughened prepregs, exhibit complex rheological behaviour with diverse flow and deformation mechanisms at various structural scales. This paper presents a new methodology for compaction testing and property identification for extraction of material parameters which will be used for the generation of analytical and numerical models.