Future Trends in Advanced Fibers and Composite Materials Tec

Future Trends in Advanced Fibers and Composite Materials Technology
A. K. Dhingra, T. P. Doherty

By drawing on the wealth of new knowledge in advanced materials, bioscience, and information science, advanced fiber and composite systems are entering a new phase of development. Advances in the understanding of structure/property relationships of materials and related processing technologies have made it possible to tailor-make new material systems, molecule by molecule, to meet specific engineering needs better than metals. The theoretical limits for strength and stiffness of fibers can be predicted based on bond strength and cohesive forces. In the future, fiber technology will continue to advance toward achieving fiber properties closer to theoreteical, increasing chemical stability, and developing new product forms tailored for specific engineering needs. The development of tailored high performance fibers and resins systems combined with advances in enabling technologies will provide most efficient solutions to engineering problems. In the future, self-monitoring and self-correcting "smart" composite systems will not only sense their structural environment but also respond to prevent strucutural failures. Just as man-made fibers revolutionized what people wear, man-made composite material systems will revolutionize how people design and build structural material systems.

This paper was a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Advanced Composite Materials.

Publisher: TMS
Product Format: PDF
Pages: 29-34
Date Published: February 1, 1993
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