Home / News / South Ural State University's team working on GFRP

South Ural State University's team working on GFRP

07 Aug '19

3 min read

Pic: South Ural State University

Scientists at the South Ural State University are working to improve the ballistic properties of glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP), a composite material commonly used in aviation, modern transport, and wind power plants. GFRP is popular since it is comparatively cheap while possessing high strength. Composites are increasingly becoming popular.

Many papers are dedicated to research on the properties of GFRP. However, practically all well-known results regarding ballistic characteristics of glass fibre reinforced plastic do not take into account various loads occurring when operating the structures, or consider comparatively low impact loading speeds. At the same time, the more important and frequently encountered problem is an impact at a high speed.

The team of scientists from SUSU’s Institute of Engineering and Technology managed to determine ballistic characteristics of glass fibre reinforced plastic under its exposure to operational loads at a high speed of impact loading.

“It is often that nozes of modern trains, which are produced out of composite materials, are exposed to impacts during the train’s movement. We have set the task to study the influence of the impact force on a plate made of composite material under the normal operational load. We stretched the sample, that is created a strained condition, and then we performed an impact and determined its ballistic properties,” says one of the project authors, Mikhail Zhikharev.

A compact acceleration test bench was used for studying the ballistic properties. During the experiment, a ballistic stand was placed inside the testing machine which helped performing stretching of the sample till the given value of preliminary load. Speed of the projectile varied from 100 till 800 m/s for each level of loading.

In order to receive the full picture of properties of the composite glass fibre reinforced plastic, a simulation was carried out using the method of finite elements of preloaded plates made of glass fibre reinforced plastic and exposed to a ballistic impact using the ANSYS Workbench package. Results of numerical modeling were sufficiently close to the data obtained in the course of the real experiment.

“We determined dependencies of ballistic limit value on the value of preload,” explains Zhikharev. “This is how we determined that the ballistic limit of a plate made of glass fibre reinforced plastic reduces for 15 per cent under loading up to 50 per cent from the ultimate strength limit. Provided taking into account the obtained data, modern trains and trams made of glass fibre reinforced plastic are going to be designed as more resistant to operational loads. This will increase their reliability and service life.”

The work on researching the properties of glass fibre reinforced plastic was carried out by scientists from South Ural State University in the frameworks of a grant by the Russian Science Foundation. The results have been published in Composites Part B: Engineering high-rank scientific journal, which is included in Scopus (Q1) citation database. (SV)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India