Infrastructure

Unidirectional thermoplastic tape manufacturing line

The unidirectional (UD) thermoplastic tape manufacturing line consists of multiple units designed for producing high-performance UD tapes. The standard components include a creel cabinet for fiber feeding, a main belt for melting and combining the polymer and fibers, calender rolls for pressing the composite into a thin tape, and cooled rolls for solidifying and winding the tapes. Additionally, the tapeline offers three interchangeable impregnation setups:

Thermoplastic extrusion impregnation (TPR)

This method involves melt impregnation where the extruded polymer is combined with fibers on a heated main roller.

Kiss roll colloidal impregnation (DPR)

In this process, fibers are impregnated on a roll that picks up polymer dispersion from a bath. The fibers then pass through a bridge to evaporate water before the polymer is melted on the main roller.

NIP roll impregnation (NPR)

Similar to kiss roll impregnation, fibers are introduced horizontally between two rolls, both of which take polymer dispersion from a bath. The impregnated fibers are then processed through a bridge to evaporate water.

Tow spreading setup

Tow spreading is a vital process in manufacturing high-performance composite materials. It ensures precise and uniform distribution of individual carbon fibers into wider, flatter ribbons or tapes. These characteristics are crucial for the production of strong, lightweight, and durable composite materials.

Tow spreading machine allows studying the relative roles of tension, wrap angle, and pulling speed and it is instrumented with several optical and conductivity based measurement sensors for precise monitoring of the process and of the spread tows.

Micro compounder (Xplore MC15HT)

The micro compounder is a twin-screw system designed for mixing and melting polymers in very small quantities (15 ml). Materials extruded from the DIE can be quenched in a water bath or cooled using airflow. Additional configurations include micro-UD tape line to produce mini UD tapes with small amounts of material.

Micro UD tape line

The micro UD tape line is a setup containing a tension-controlled unwinding unit, spreader unit including straight or conical spreading bars, impregnation die, and winding set-up. This is a setup to produce small UD tapes with small amounts of material that enables developing processes and products for new material combinations.

Mini Pultrusion

The mini pultrusion setup is for producing small quantity of fibre reinforced plastics. Fibers are impregnated in resin by pulling fibres through a bath with resins and through a heated die (heated metal source). In this stage the fibre reinforced plastics can be made by choosing the right curing temperature, curing time and by using the right pulling shear stress.  This setup allows developing and optimizing processes for novel sustainable materials.