The Right Combination Of Materials Increases Driving Pleasure

Force Technology, a technology service provider from Denmark, has a lot of experience in the design of composite materials and researches both the specific properties of the material and possible new areas of application. In this context, the composite materials specialist Benjamin Hornblow and his team recently took up the challenge of designing a new longboard. The goal of the design was to find the ideal composite board composition to optimize performance, reduce weight, and better absorb the vibrations generated when riding a longboard.

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The team looked at all the materials currently used on longboards - from maple and bamboo to various other material combinations - and compared the properties and performance potential of the respective materials. The usual structure of today's boards consists of a sandwich structure with a lower, carbon-fiber-reinforced layer, a core layer of maple and an upper, glass-fiber-reinforced layer. This structure was used as a reference for the new design. The performance of reinforcing fibers, which are to serve as the most important structural component, was then examined and five natural fiber materials - cotton, flax, hemp, jute and kenaf - compared with industrially manufactured materials such as glass and carbon fibers.

Supplementing the topic of getting fit for lightweight construction solutions

The 2nd User Meeting for Lightweight Construction at the Construction Practice Academy will take place on May 30 and 31, 2017 in Würzburg. It is aimed at product developers and designers in machine, plant, equipment and vehicle construction, whose task is to reduce the weight of components so that energy and material can be saved or costs can be reduced.

While the basics of material, constructive and production engineering lightweight construction were taught at the 1st user meeting for lightweight construction, this year the event deepens the topics of material selection, topology optimization, additive manufacturing and composite materials.

Lectures provide information about the latest developments and show best practice examples. There are also practice forums and an exhibition. www.anwendertreff- Leichtbau.de

Using the database to find the right material

In the first approach, the stiffness and damping properties of the material candidates were examined. For this purpose, the materials in question were identified with the CES Selector software from Granta Design. The result was that flax fibers were in the same stiffness range as glass fibers, but both materials fell significantly behind the stiffness of carbon fibers.

When comparing the tensile strength, the natural fibers couldn't keep up with the synthetic ones, yet their performance was sufficient for a stiffness driven design. When comparing the mechanical loss coefficients, it became clear that the damping properties of flax fibers were three times higher than those of glass or

carbon fibers.

Identify the best material graphically

This result led the engineers to choose a combination of flax and carbon fiber reinforcement when designing the board. The stiffness properties of the carbon fibers were combined with the damping properties of the flax fibers. Since flax is also lighter than carbon fiber, potential weight advantages of the material could also be used.

With the synthesizer tool from CES Selector, the team then modeled the performance of the reference board and the new board with up to seven layers of composite material. Then a graphical evaluation, in which the bending stiffness against the density was shown, was provided with an index line. This showed how a light, stiff panel behaves when it bends. This enabled the team to identify which materials are the most suitable. A board made of flax fiber / epoxy resin composite would have worse properties than a board made of maple, while bamboo would be even more suitable. To everyone's surprise, the reference board showed no better properties than the board made of pure bamboo.

CES Selector- an overview in the video:

Content of the article:

• Page 1: The right combination of materials increases driving pleasure
• Page 2: Faster to the better product

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