Session: 03-05-01: Nanomaterials

Paper Number: 108492

108492 - Modeling-Driven Damage Tolerant Design of Graphene Nanoplatelet/carbon Fiber/epoxy Hybrid Composite Panels for Full-Scale Aerospace Structures 

The objective of this study is to design a new nano graphene/carbon fiber/polymer hybrid composite that can be used for the NASA SLS Composite Exploration Upper Stage (CEUS) forward skirt structure. The new material will improve the resistance to open-hole compression failure of the structure relative to traditional polymer fiber composites. The material is designed rapidly and with little cost using the Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) approach. Multiscale modeling and experiments are used to synergistically optimize the material design to yield improved properties and performance by controlling key processing parameters for manufacturing nano-enhanced materials. Specifically, the nanocomposite panel showed a 22% reduction in mass relative to the traditional composite panel, while both designs are equal in terms of ease of manufacture.  This potential mass savings corresponds to an estimated 45% savings in materials and manufacturing costs.   The multiscale ICME workflow developed for this project can be readily applied to the development of nano-enhanced composite materials and large aerospace structures. In addition, all key aspects of ICME were employed to complete this project including multiscale modeling, experimental characterization and visualization, data management, visualization, error and uncertainty quantification, and education. The results presented herein indicate a dramatic level of success, as well as the power and potential of ICME approach and multiscale modeling for composite materials.

Presenting Author: Gregory Odegard Michigan Tech Univ

Presenting Author Biography: Prof. Gregory Odegard is the John O. Hallquist Endowed Chair in Computational Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering – Engineering Mechanics at Michigan Tech. He is the Director of the NASA Institute for Ultra-Strong Composites by Computational Design, which is focused on development the next generation of composites materials for manned deep-space missions. Before joining the faculty at Michigan Tech, Greg was a researcher at NASA Langley Research Center from 2000-2004. He received his PhD at the University of Denver in 2000. His research is focused on computational modeling of advanced material systems. According to Google Scholar, he has been cited over 8,900 times in the literature, and has an h-index of 41. He is a Fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA.

Authors:

Gregory Odegard Michigan Tech Univ
Evan Pineda NASA Glenn Research Center
Brett Bednarcyk NASA Glenn Research Center