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Advanced Manufacturing in Polymer Processing

A special issue of Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360). This special issue belongs to the section "Polymer Processing and Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 October 2023) | Viewed by 4081

Special Issue Editor

Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Platform, Technological University of the Shannon, N37 HD68 Athlone, Ireland
Interests: hybrid manufacturing; advanced manufacturing; additive manufacturing; mass customisation; polymer processing; thermoplastic composites
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Advanced manufacturing describes the adoption of innovative technologies and processes to drive improved competitiveness across the manufacturing base. In the context of polymer processing, it encompasses the technological advancement of traditional extrusion and moulding processes to manufacture products in a better way or to provide the capability to manufacture entirely new types of products. Innovative technologies will improve the efficiency and intelligence of polymer processing, leading to enhanced factory output with increased margins, better quality products, and new products.

This Special Issue, "Advanced Manufacturing in Polymer Processing," will gather original research and review papers on basic scientific studies and applied industrial applications in the field of advanced manufacturing. Papers must go beyond traditional polymer processing, displaying clear increases in process efficiency or product quality, or demonstrating a more intelligent production method. Extrusion-film, pipe, tubing, compounding and moulding injection, roto, compression, extrusion blow, and stretch blow are techniques that you are encouraged to study, as well as more unique production techniques. Process enhancements include, but are not limited to, hybrid processing, low-energy processing, smart processing, prefabrication, and preassembly.

Dr. Ian Major
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Polymers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • hybrid manufacturing
  • advanced manufacturing
  • smart manufacturing
  • mass customisation
  • low-energy processing
  • composite manufacturing
  • extrusion
  • moulding
  • preassembly
  • prefabrication

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 6513 KiB  
Article
Cohesive Zone Modeling of the Interface Fracture in Full-Thermoplastic Hybrid Composites for Lightweight Application
by Ruggero Giusti and Giovanni Lucchetta
Polymers 2023, 15(22), 4459; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym15224459 - 19 Nov 2023
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1844
Abstract
With the increasing demand for lightweight and high-performance materials in the automotive and aerospace industries, full-thermoplastic hybrid composites have emerged as a pivotal solution, offering enhanced mechanical properties and design flexibility. This work aims to numerically model the fracture strength in full-thermoplastic hybrid [...] Read more.
With the increasing demand for lightweight and high-performance materials in the automotive and aerospace industries, full-thermoplastic hybrid composites have emerged as a pivotal solution, offering enhanced mechanical properties and design flexibility. This work aims to numerically model the fracture strength in full-thermoplastic hybrid composites made by forming and overmolding organosheets. The mode I fracture was investigated by modeling the behavior of T-joint specimens under a tensile test following the cohesive zone modeling (CZM) approach. The sample was designed to replicate the connection between the laminate and the overmolded part. Double cantilever beam (DCB) specimens were manufactured with organosheets and tested to mode I opening to determine the interlaminar fracture toughness. The fracture toughness out of the mode I test with DCB specimens was used to define the CZM parameters that describe the traction-separation law. Later, due to the particular geometry of the T-join specimens that under tensile load work close to pure mode I, the cohesive parameters were determined by inverse analysis, i.e., calibrating the theoretical models to match experimental results. The fracture resistance T-joint specimens appeared dependent on the fiber-bridging phenomenon during the delamination. In particular, the presence of fiber-bridging visible from the experimental results has been replicated by virtual analyses, and it is observed that it leads to a higher energy value before the interface’s complete breakage. Moreover, a correspondence between the mode I fracture toughness of the DCB specimen and T-joint specimens was observed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Manufacturing in Polymer Processing)
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17 pages, 3920 KiB  
Article
Mass Customization of Polylactic Acid (PLA) Parts via a Hybrid Manufacturing Process
by Ke Gong, Handai Liu, Cheng Huang, Qinyu Jiang, Han Xu, Zhi Cao, Evert Fuenmayor and Ian Major
Polymers 2022, 14(24), 5413; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym14245413 - 10 Dec 2022
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 1720
Abstract
Mass customization is the development of items tailored to specific customers, but produced at low unit cost in high-volume. In this context, hybrid manufacturing (HM) combines fused deposition modeling (FDM) and injection molding (IM) to fabricate a single personalized part with minimum manufacturing [...] Read more.
Mass customization is the development of items tailored to specific customers, but produced at low unit cost in high-volume. In this context, hybrid manufacturing (HM) combines fused deposition modeling (FDM) and injection molding (IM) to fabricate a single personalized part with minimum manufacturing cost. In this technique, inserts with different physical features are first FDM-fabricated and then IM-overmolded. This study investigated the effect of hybrid FDM-IM production technology, FDM insert geometry on mechanical properties, and micro-structural evolution of Polylactic Acid (PLA) samples. The findings indicated a comparable tensile properties of FDM-IM samples (68.38 MPa) to IM batch (68.95 MPa), emphasizing the potential of HM in the manufacturing industry. Maximum tensile stress of FDM-IM specimens shows an upward trend due to the increased infill density of preforms. In addition, overmolding interface direction results in a big gap for the maximum tensile strengths between half-length series specimens (12.99 MPa to 19.09 MPa) and half-thickness series specimens (53.83 MPa to 59.92 MPa). Furthermore, four joint configurations resulted in different mechanical performances of finished specimens, in which the female cube sample exhibits the highest tensile stress (68.38 MPa), while the batch with male T joint shows a lower value in maximum tensile strength (59.51 MPa), exhibiting a similar tensile performance with the half-thickness 75% batch without joint configuration. This study lays the groundwork for using HM to produce bespoke and mechanically improved parts over FDM alone. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Manufacturing in Polymer Processing)
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