MAT- ME Joint Seminar

MAT- ME Joint Seminar

Title: Process and Structural Health Monitoring of Resin Transfer Molded Composite Structures by Fiber Bragg Grating Optic Sensors.

In this presentation, the research focused on the manufacturing, process monitoring, and structural health management of fiber reinforced advanced polymer-based composite materials. The overall objectives of this research is to; design, and manufacture advanced polymer based-composite structures using the Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) technique for application in aircraft structures, monitor the RTM manufacturing process using fiber Bragg grating optical sensors to ensure the high quality of manufactured components, and to use the same fiber-optic sensor arrays to manage the health of the structural component (damage detection) while in service. In this direction, a laboratory scale resin transfer molding (RTM) apparatus was designed and built with the capability of embedding fiber optic sensors and visually observing the resin filling process. Both fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and etched fiber (EF) sensors are embedded into glass fiber reinforcements in the RTM mold and used to monitor the resin flow front and cure. The cure cycle of the resin system utilized in this work is also studied using a Fresnel reflection refractometer (FRR) sensor. The results of this study show that both the FBG and EF sensors can be used efficiently for flow and cure monitoring of the RTM process. The embedded FBG sensors are also used for monitoring the structural health of the composite under tensile and fatigue loadings.

Brief CV: Dr. Yildiz (meyildiz@sabanciuniv.edu//people.sabanciuniv.edu/meyildiz/), graduated from the Department of Metallurgical Engineering in 1996 at Yildiz Technical University with first place. He completed his Master degree in 2000 in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at Istanbul Technical University while working in gas and pipeline industries as a welding and non-destructive engineer. He received his PhD degree in 2005 in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. His PhD research was in the area of experimental and computational materials processing, and transport phenomena with application to semiconductor crystal growth. Upon the completion of his PhD study, he started working as a research associate and instructor in the same department with the research focus on composite materials and structural health monitoring with optic sensors. He has joined to Materials Science and Engineering Program at SU as a faculty member in Sep 2007. His recent research focuses on manufacturing, process monitoring, and structural health management of polymer-based composite materials, nano-composites with carbon nano tubes and electrospun fibers and meshless computational fluid dynamics, particularly Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics.