Faruk Can ZDEMR

FIBERGLASSS & CARBONFIBERS BODY MOLDING FOR PROTOTYPE VEHICLE MODELS AND BRIEF SPECIFICATIONS

The Abstract

In this article, we investigated which is the best solution for prototype models body molding and producting process with glass & carbon fiber composites. For this investigation, we used Hacettepe Universitys Hydrogen Vehicle Prototype to describe molding problems and properties of carbonfiber and fiberglass composites. This is the most important process to build a prototype models body frames. To construct glass & carbon fiber body must need a molding procedure . We described how it be possible and what we need to complete all the moulding operations of these. We got results for advantages and disadvantages of these two materials. To prepare this article, we used many different types of molding methods and implementation process. We seperated fiberglass & carbonfiber molding techniques on different titles to inform more clearly. We discussed molding implementation, moulding equipments, moulding procedures, moulding techniques, getting products from molds and finalizations. Conclusions of all these researches and applications, we have two different important characterictics. For fiberglass, hard resistance and easy application, for carbonfiber most aquirate and professional usage. With these informations, if you want to get more hard and resistive product from mold, you must use carbonfiber composites. On the otherhand, if you want to get easy applicable and reliable product from mold, you must use fiberglass composites. You can choose concerned material for your manufacturing projects.

Faruk Can ZDEMR

The Introduction

Prototype models make for to accomplish a mission about modelize some designed vehicles, tools or something engineered. Prototypes are mirror models of main products. These models provide many information about engineering terminology to redesign main product like aerodymanics, robustness, flexibility, manufacturability, problems on designs so on. With these informations, you can change many parts and mental problems on your product. When you change necessary design or engineering problems on your prototypes, you can easily update your main product to get more efficiency. To wrestle out your molding process affects all of these revisions and datas. Successfully designed molding always give more acquirate prototypes. Successful prototypes mostly give more appraisable datas for your projects analysises. The acceptable molding process is always important to get practicable real product. Especially working on fiberglass and carbonfiber, this real products quality is more important than the others. We used Hacettepe Universitys Hydrogen Vehicles Prototype HUDRO for Shell Eco Marathon which organizes by Royal Dutch Shell Company. This model is a prototype of real hydrogen powered vehicle which will manufacture following years in Turkey. HUDRO use to analyze airflowing on hydrogen compartment, fuel cell technologies, battery techologies on hydrogen systems and surface datas. The reliable datas can get from reliable prototypes. HUDROs molding process and its materials quality and advantages are important to get efficient datas. When you make a prototype of vehicle, you provide these steps to produce ; 1. Components of Vehicle, Assembly 2. Chasis Design and Manufacturing 3. Engine & Transmissions 4. Body Design & Body Molding 5. Painting and Exteriors 6. Interior Works and Finalizations

Faruk Can ZDEMR

These are the most important general stages of to produce a vehicle because every step must be able to support previous steps with in all technical requirements. After the all digital designings, Components of Vehicle is main selections of parts to produce your vehicle. Your vehicle can be a ship, so, you can assembly parts which are manufactured for watercrafts, likewise, if you produce a tank, you must provide defense equipments for your vehicle components. After this step, you must design Chasis. Chasis is the main carrier of your all product. Must be solid, must be resistant. After this step, you place engine and mandatory transmissions which are suitable for your vehicle. At mechanical section, there is the most important step to produce a vehicle, body. In our world, bodies of vehicles are various. We have metal type bodies, composite bodies and hybrid bodies. In many cars around you, companies prefer metal type bodies for security and solidity. Otherwise, at race and electricity car industries, companies prefer composite bodies because composites are much more lighter, much more resistive and much more flexible. Composites are various like many other body shapes. They have some advantages and disadvantages. In this article, you can figure out which composite can be usable for which situation. There is two main composites mostly use. Fiberglass and Carbonfiber. In shortly, the se composites make by fibers of different type of materials. Fiberglass is the combina tion of fiberized glass material. Glass fibers weave as a plane to get fiberglass. Alike, carbonfiber is the combination of fibers which can created from special carbon ato ms. We used two types of composites in our project. There is some problem on reliab ility and economy of these composites. We can explain these problem like this. If yo u make a decision to produce your vehicle from these composites, you must use these steps ; 1. General Body Designing 2. Body Molding Procedure 3. Molding 4. Removing From The Mold 5. Getting Product

Faruk Can ZDEMR

Molding processes are most important section at working on composites. Your vehicles reliability is all connected with molding. A superized molding, your vehicle body can be perfect. The main problems can be described as ; What we expect from our vehicles body ? ( Properties ) What we need to get fine product from mold ? How the molding process effect vehicle generally ? Which composite we must use ? HUDRO is a hydrogen powered car. It have an electricity hub-engine, aluminium alloy chasis and a fuelcell. It must be provide much more efficiency from other prototype fuel cars. So what can we do to get more efficiency from HUDRO ? We can lighten down all the body, we can change our engine with more efficient engine and we can change all chasis system. Changing engine and chasis systems are very expensive and exhausting processes but lighten down body can be applicable. There is a main question, what we expect from body ? With a brief information, if you want to resistive, robust, expensive and light body, you can use carbonfiber. There is a table about carbonfibers properties fro m others. If you want to mid-resistive, mid-robust, cheap and lighter from metals, yo u can use fiberglass. When you make a desicion about materials, can jump other ques tion. What we need to get fine product from mold ? Molding process of fiberglass and carbonfiber like the same techniques. There is an only diffenrence between chemical materials used on mold. These chemicals are likely same represent but affects different properties on conposites. The most important chemicals are resins. In fiberglass molding process we use poliester but in carbonfiber molding process we use epoxy adhesive to get strength carbonfiber or fiberglass. These are the common resins to process on mold. This chemicals quality directly affects your body. Last, the final question about problems, how the molding process influence vehicle generally ? Molding process is important because perfection at molding and chemicals are directly influence your vehicle bodys strength and other properties which you want. Bodys strengthness is directly affects your vehicles aerodynamics, this aerodynamic impacts are directly affects vehicles efficiency on engine or fuel. As you see, just molding process can affect all the procedures and typical mechanicals of your vehicle like a ripple.

Faruk Can ZDEMR

The Methods

To start with, we completed all isometric and manufacturable digital designs of Hudro. To make a model for molding process, we operated a foam at CNC cutting system. Purpose of this, foam is the male-model of our vehicles body frame. The molding process is upon this foam. After cutting operations, modelled foam came to molding office. At here, we had to make a decision where will be carbonfiber on the vehicle, where will be fiberglass. The main purpose of this decision is what we expect specialized parts of vehicle. a. Contributor We used Hacettepe Universitys Hydrogen Powered Vehicle HUDRO for this molding process. It will attend Shell Eco Marathon Europe 2012 so it must have reliable, light body and efficient power from its datas. As a result of these, molding process must be perfect. b. Materials We used different types of chemicals to get more acquirate body. We used ; 1 Liter Epoxy Resin, Epoxy Resins are thermosetting resins, which cure by internally generated heat. Epoxy systems consist of two parts, resin and hardener. When mixed together, the resin and hardener activate, causing a chemical reaction, which cures (hardens) the material. Epoxy resins generally have greater bonding and physical strength than do polyester resins. Most epoxies are slower in curing, and more unforgiving in relation to proportions of resins and hardener than polyesters. Superior adhesion is important in critical applications and when glassing or gluing surfaces such as steel, redwood, cedar, oak and teak as well as other non-porous surfaces. * 4 Liter Poliester Resin Polyester Resin is a liquid which will cure to a solid when the hardener is added. It has been specially formulated to cure at room temperature. The hardener, MEKP (Methyl Ethyl Ketone Peroxide) is added to cure, or harden the resin. MEKP hardeners for polyester resin, often referred to as catalyst come in small plastic tubes or bottles with graduated measurements marked on them. Hardeners are measured in drops or fractions of teaspoons for most lay-up or repair jobs. Do not over-catalyze or under-catalyze -- you may ruin the resin and have to start again. Always consult the manufacturers instructions for mixing the correct proportions of hardener to resin. Factors that will affect the hardening time

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and working time are temperature, thickness of the application, quantities of resin mixed per batch and humidity ** 0.5 Liter Mold Release Agent, A release agent is a chemical used to prevent other materials from bonding to surfaces. It can provide a solution in processes involving mold release, diecast release, plastic release, and tireand web release. *** 30 M2 200gr/m2 Plain Carbonfiber. There are several types of weaves out there; Twill, Satin, Plain, Uni-directional (Uni), triaxial, and so on. What you need to understand about weaves is that the more under and over lapping within the weave the weaker it will be. For example a plain weave will be more prone to breaking than a 4 harness satin weave using the same type of tow. Why? Because as the cloth begins to come under tension the fibers try to straighten out but can't because there is another tow bundle under them restricting them from becoming straight. Therefore, there is a shear force applied to the straightening tow and it snaps. In other words as the tow straightens out it presses on the tow that is running under or over it going the opposite / cross direction. **** 50 M2 Fiberglass.

c. Design of Molding Process We can simplfy molding design with this route ; 1. First of all, at molding, there is a male and female mold. Male mold is the positive body of your vehicle. In other words, if you apply molding process to your male mold, you get negative prototype of your vehicle. You must apply a molding process again to get real body. On the contrary, female mold is the negative body of your vehicle. If you apply molding process to your female mold, you get true body shape from the mold. Due to this orientation, we must get female mold to get real product more quicker than male mold. 2. After getting female mold, mold release agent diffuses inside the mold to release main product easily. 3. After, we lay fiberglass and carbonfiber into the our mold. 4. Resins of spesific materials prepare carefully. Poliesters and epoxies diffuse on the fibers. Poliesters for fiberglasses, epoxies for carbonfibers as a described. 5. When finish the waiting time, main product releases from the mold.

Faruk Can ZDEMR

d. Procedure For molding, primarily, we produced a fiberglass female-model to accomplish molding from this model. This fiberglass female-model is our main mold. After you produce a fiberglass mold, you can produce any product from this mold with suitable materials like carbonfiber, fiberglass, glass whatever. We choose carbonfiber for our body, fiberglass for our aerodynamic parts. After this decision, mold process were prepared for carbonfiber first. First of all, we spread mold release agent on the female-model. This chemical can be use to release main product from the mold easily with any damage. Important thing with this chemical is, when you use mold release agent, you can get 5 or 6 product at one production cycle from the mold. After, we applied carbonfiber to the mold. In this step, you must be sure that nowhere of the mold can be separate. You must have fully defined carbonfiber mold to get fine products. After this process, epoxy resins apllied on carbonfiber with sectional sticks. Mentally, epoxy must catch all carbon atoms to get them resistive. Finally, we left mold to dry 48 hours. For fiberglass molding process, we repeated all steps with fiberglass and polyester resins. Drying time is important because this type of composites have an internal flexibility. Air stretchs adhesive applied carbonfiber and fiberglass. Minimum 24, maximum 72 hour drying time is suitable for molding processes. When we release the body from mold, we had 3.863 grams carbonfiber body with 600 mm height, 77 mm width and 2.505 mm length dimensions body . This is the lightest body frame for a hydrogen powered vehicle at Turkey. We succeeded our limits. The Results Eventually, we produced a carbonfiber body and fiberglass aerodynamic parts for Hacettepe University Hyrogen Powered Vehicle Hudro. We learned the important section of manufacture a prototype vehicle is molding process because molding is affect everything engineered on your vehicle actively and passively. We got %6.7 airflow efficiency values from ANSYS with carbonfiber and fiberglass parts. We have reduced the weight of vehicle approximately 7900g by our foresight.

Faruk Can ZDEMR

The Discussion

Thus we can say after all applied processes, advantages and disadvantages of fiberglass and carbonfiber ; 1. Carbonfiber is the most acquirate composite material for prototype race cars. 2. Carbonfiber is the most expensive selection of composite materials. 3. Molding of carbonfiber is much more exhausted than fiberglass molding. 4. Carbonfiber molding process equipments are much more dangerous. 5. Mold Release Agent is adequate for molding. 6. 200g/m2 Plain Carbonfiber is suitable for prototype vehicles. 7. Fiberglass aerodynamic parts are much more efficient than carbonfiber aerodynamic parts because carbonfiber parts are more resistive to air than the fiberglass parts. 8. Fiberglass female-model is appropriate for similar projects. 9. Fiberglass and Carbonfiber can reduce weight equally due to differet chemical usage.

This experimental working on fiberglass and carbonfiber molding taught us fiberglass and carbonfiber usage for different specified parts. How we should use these fiber types molding and where we shouldnt questions explained with this article. General explained questions are simply can list like this ;

What is fiberglass and carbonfiber briefly ? How we complete molding process easily ? Where is useful to use carbonfiber or fiberglass ? Which equipments we need ? How we reduce weight of prototype vehicles from body specifications ? Why we should use carbonfiber or fiberglass for body molding ?

Faruk Can ZDEMR

The References

*Evercoat, Choosing The Right Resin Epoxy Resin ** Evercoat, Choosing The Right Resin Polyester Resin *** Water Based Release Agents **** Carbon Fiber Basics

Abernathy, William. The Productivity Dilemma: Roadblock to Innovation in the Automobile Industry. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Seiffert, Ulrich. Automobile Technology of the Future. Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., 1991. Mortimer, John. Advanced Manufacturing in the Automotive Industry. Air Science Co., 1986. Autar K. Kaw (2005). Mechanics of Composite Materials (2nd ed.). CRC. ISBN 0-8493-1343-0