Characterization of endless fiber-reinforced thermoplastics in CAMPUS database

For over 30 years, the world's leading plastics producers have been using the CAMPUS database to provide their customers with important, high-quality data about their materials.

CAMPUS consistently adheres to testing standards, providing the best data quality in the world and ensuring that data from all participants is comparable.

So far, CAMPUS has mainly provided data on injection moldable thermoplastics. Thermoplastics with continuous fiber reinforcement could not be taken into account,t because industry lacked uniform procedures for material characterization.

Since 2015, a working group of material manufacturers under the umbrella of AVK has been dealing with this problem. The aim is to develop a generally accepted procedure for the characterization of continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastics in the form of tradable semi-finished products (organic sheets or tapes) and, if this is not the case, to standardize it internationally.

Leading manufacturers (Arkema, Bond Laminates/Lanxess, Covestro, DSM, Evonik, Mitsui, Profol, Sabic, Solvay) work directly together in this working group. The Institute for Composite Materials (IVW GmbH) is in charge and scientific director. Furthermore, there is a close exchange with a monitoring committee of the automotive industry consisting of OEMs (BMW, Daimler, Ford, Opel...).

In the meantime, the work is well advanced and the first results are available that allow this new class of materials to be incorporated into CAMPUS. The operators of CAMPUS were convinced of the usefulness of the proposed tests and gave the go-ahead for integration. The extended version of CAMPUS with material data for endless fiber-reinforced thermoplastics will be released to the public just in time for the plastics trade fair.

In a first step, the essential parameters for describing the basic material properties are activated. The user should be able to select materials based on these properties and to pre-design structures from these materials. In addition to general product information (manufacturer, processing, ...), mechanical (direction-dependent stiffness and strength), thermal (coefficient of expansion, ...) and general characteristic values (density, ...) can be found.

In the future, further steps will be taken to supplement the data, especially with regard to the use of the data in CAE software.

Further information and demonstrations will be offered at the booth of M-Base (Hall 5 F02) and AVK (Hall 8a F11-1). Or on the Internet at www.campusplastics.com or www.ivw.uni-kl.de.