Wet lamination of Sandwich panel

[Sanjiv Lancy]

Hello All,

We are looking into using shear panels for our chassis. However since this is a new concept to us, there are a couple of areas we do not know quite well.

I would like to know whats the process (material required, resin, method etc) involved for using a wet-layup technique over the shear panel (eg. Aluminum Honeycomb core, Fibreglass skin)such that it would wrap around steel tubing which are bonded to the edges of the panel. If any of you can provide information regarding this matter or even point me to useful websites or articles, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Regards

Sanjiv

[Sanjiv Lancy]

Hello All,

We are looking into using shear panels for our chassis. However since this is a new concept to us, there are a couple of areas we do not know quite well.

I would like to know whats the process (material required, resin, method etc) involved for using a wet-layup technique over the shear panel (eg. Aluminum Honeycomb core, Fibreglass skin)such that it would wrap around steel tubing which are bonded to the edges of the panel. If any of you can provide information regarding this matter or even point me to useful websites or articles, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Regards

Sanjiv

[LU-Bolton]

If you choose to take the route of shear panels I can give you one piece of advice that was important to the fabrication of our monocoque.

Generally, just bonding composite panels together is not the ideal joint, although it has obviously worked in other applications, (i.e. Lotus Elise aluminum panels, etc.) For the structural glue that we used to hold our chassis together, the stiffness of the glue itself was not very high. It has a very high shear strength, but to make the overall joint stiffer we wet laid on top of using a glued joint. If I remember correctly, the stiffness of the wet laid fiber sections was on the order of 100 times the stiffness of the glued joint. Don't take my word for it though, do some more research and start making phone calls along with finding a professor that deals with composites.

By the way, the reason the rest of us monocoque teams don't use glued/wet laid together shear panels is because all of those joints become very heavy. It's a lot more efficient to reduce the amount of glue and wet laid fibers.

Good luck

Aaron Cassebeer