Last year, a group of researchers at ETH Zürich (Arthur Schlothauer, Georgios A. Pappas, and Paolo Ermanni) published one of the most interesting articles we have seen in a while! They have studied the ”Material Response and Failure of Highly Deformable Carbon Fiber Composite Shells”.
We think about carbon fiber composites as very stiff, however, as the authors suggest, when this material is manufactured thin enough, it can withstand very high deformations! The resulting high tensile and compressive strains require accurate modeling of the fiber-dominated non-linear effects to predict the mechanical response.
These thin, unidirectional carbon fiber composite shells can be folded to impressively small bending radii without failure. The ability to elastically sustain and recover large deformations makes these materials highly beneficial for applications like deployable space structures, future medical devices, or shape adaptable meta-materials.
Interested in learning more about this topic? Here is the link to the publication: https://lnkd.in/e_ywKNZ
