Composites are truly the materials of the future, due to their excellent properties such as high strength to weight ratio, and their use is rising exponentially, continuing to replace or augment traditional materials in different sectors such as aerospace, automotive, wind turbine blades, civil engineering infrastructure and sporting goods. A good example is the construction of large aircraft such as the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 which are 53% and 50% composite by weight, respectively. However, while the fibre dominant properties guarantee excellent in-plane load-bearing characteristics, traditional composite materials exhibit weak resistance to out-of-plane loads, making them susceptible to barely visible impact damage (BVID) under impact loads that can happen during manufacturing or in service. BVID can drastically reduce the strength, without any visible warning. Structures that look fine can fail suddenly at loads much lower than expected. This weak impact resistance together with the complexity of the failure mechanisms typical of composite systems led in the past decade to complex and expensive maintenance/inspection procedures. Therefore, a significantly greater safety margin than other materials leads to conservative design in composite structures. Based on these premises, the need is clear for a comprehensive solution that matches the requirements of lightweight structures with the need for high impact resistance and ease of inspection. This project is aimed at the design and development of next generation of high-performance impact resistant composites with visibility of damage and improved compression after impact strength. These exceptional properties are caused with ability to visualise and control failure modes to happen in an optimised way. Energy would be absorbed by gradual and sacrificial damage, strength would be maintained, and there would be visible evidence of damage. This would eliminate the need for very low design strains to cater for BVID, providing a step change in composite performance, leading to greater reliability and safety, together with reduced design and maintenance requirements, and longer service life. This is an exciting opportunity to develop this novel proposed technology with my extensive industrial partners, a potentially transformative prospect for the UK composites research and industry.

The aerospace industry is at a turning point: environmental concerns, legal frameworks and new energy sources mean that the industry needs to explore a different structural design space for composite aircraft configurations. Yet this is not readily possible using the slower experimentally-heavy design pyramid followed by industry in the past. The above scenario makes a compelling case for numerical structural design of very large integrated composite aircraft structures, but this problem is intractable. My vision is that structural design of very large composite structures can be enabled by a new simulation paradigm: I propose that, during the analysis, CAE models of very large structures adapt in real-time the scale of idealisation as required (adaptive multiscale), adapt in real-time the configuration of the structure (adaptive configuration), and where intelligent algorithms work at the back-end (HPC cluster) to extract high-value data from over 1 Tb output databases as they are being built. This paradigm will enable numerical design of very large integrated composite structures, thus having a significant impact on the emergence of much-needed new aircraft configurations.

Composites are truly the materials of the future, due to their excellent properties such as high strength to weight ratio, and their use is rising exponentially, continuing to replace or augment traditional materials in different sectors such as aerospace, automotive, wind turbine blades, civil engineering infrastructure and sporting goods. A good example is the construction of large aircraft such as the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 which are 53% and 50% composite by weight, respectively. However, while the fibre dominant properties guarantee excellent in-plane load-bearing characteristics, traditional composite materials exhibit weak resistance to out-of-plane loads, making them susceptible to barely visible impact damage (BVID) under impact loads that can happen during manufacturing or in service. BVID can drastically reduce the strength, without any visible warning. Structures that look fine can fail suddenly at loads much lower than expected. This weak impact resistance together with the complexity of the failure mechanisms typical of composite systems led in the past decade to complex and expensive maintenance/inspection procedures. Therefore, a significantly greater safety margin than other materials leads to conservative design in composite structures. Based on these premises, the need is clear for a comprehensive solution that matches the requirements of lightweight structures with the need for high impact resistance and ease of inspection. This project is aimed at the design and development of next generation of high-performance impact resistant composites with visibility of damage and improved compression after impact strength. These exceptional properties are caused with ability to visualise and control failure modes to happen in an optimised way. Energy would be absorbed by gradual and sacrificial damage, strength would be maintained, and there would be visible evidence of damage. This would eliminate the need for very low design strains to cater for BVID, providing a step change in composite performance, leading to greater reliability and safety, together with reduced design and maintenance requirements, and longer service life. This is an exciting opportunity to develop this novel proposed technology with my extensive industrial partners, a potentially transformative prospect for the UK composites research and industry.

Structural power composites are mechanically load-bearing materials with the capacity to store and deliver electrical energy. These multifunctional composites are a completely different way of using structural materials, combining two critical technologies (lightweighting and energy storage). Their adoption in transportation, portable electronics and grid infrastructure could significantly help in meeting the NetZero targets. At present, to fulfil range requirements in electric vehicles, a sizable proportion (~25%) of the vehicle weight are the batteries. To reduce this parasitic mass, the conventional approach is to increase battery energy density, but this has considerable sustainability, safety and longevity issues. But by making the vehicle body from structural materials that can store electrical energy, huge weight savings can be made. For example, we've shown that for a given energy density, electric cars made using structural power materials would have about twice the range of that of a car using conventional batteries. In another example, not requiring aircraft wings to be hollow (to store fuel or batteries) would release design constraints: the wings could be very slender, reducing drag, having a profound effect on future aircraft designs and range. Structural power composites have the potential to revolutionise future transportation, portable electronics and infrastructure. However, since the investigators pioneered their development, their translation to industry are being hampered by issues such as poor microstructural control, inconsistent device manufacture, poor scale-up due to inefficient current collection and lack of encapsulation solutions. This proposal aims to address these issues, enabling industrial adoption of structural power composites to the benefit of society. The research focusses on supercapacitors: energy storage devices that provide rapid charge/discharge cycles. Our structural supercapacitors consist of two carbon-fibre lamina electrodes that are infused with a carbon aerogel (CAG). These electrodes sandwich an ion-conducting, but electrically-insulating, separator and this laminate is infused with a structural electrolyte (SE). The research proposed will be undertaken by a complementary team from Imperial College London (ICL), Durham University (DU) & University of Bristol (UoB), in collaboration with industries ranging from material suppliers (Hexcel, Gen2Carbon & CME), research providers (Hive Composites, NCC & NPL) to OMEs (Airbus & BAE Systems). We will address manufacturing issues for realising structural power, focussing on the interdependent aspects of WP1: Structural Electrolytes (DU), WP2: Device Fabrication (UoB) and WP3: Current Collection and Encapsulation (ICL). In WP1 (Structural Electrolytes) we will pursue two parallel strategies. The first approach will be using our existing formulation but improve the processability without detrimental effects to its performance. The second, more adventurous approach, is using a different matrix chemistry to produce a more highly refined microstructure in the SE. The formulations under development in WP1 will be adopted in WP2 (Device Fabrication), where we will explore better control of the microstructure during processing either through filming the SE or infusing the SE into the dry electrode/separator stack. To better understand and control the SE microstructure during processing we will design a smart mould which will provide detailed monitoring and control of the flow and cure conditions during manufacture. In WP3 (Current Collection and Encapsulation) we will identify and model materials and processes to minimise the resistive losses and parasitic mass of current collection. Finally, the encapsulation task will identify materials that offer an impervious barrier but can transfer mechanical load into the structural supercapacitor. The work will culminate in demonstration of the best concepts in industry-inspired applications.

Conventional composites such as carbon fibre reinforced plastics have outstanding mechanical properties: high strength and stiffness, low weight, and low susceptibility to fatigue and corrosion. Composites are truly the materials of the future, their properties can be tailored to particular applications and capabilities for sensing, changing shape or self healing can also be included. Their use is rising exponentially, continuing to replace or augment traditional materials. A key example is the construction of new large aircraft, such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350, mainly from carbon fibre composites. At the same time, there is rapid expansion of composite use in applications such as wind turbine blades, sporting goods and civil engineering infrastructure.Despite this progress, a fundamental and as yet unresolved limitation of current composites is their inherent brittleness. Failure is usually sudden and catastrophic, with little or no warning or capacity to carry load afterwards. A related problem is their susceptibility to impact damage, which can drastically reduce the strength, without any visible warning. Structures that look fine can fail suddenly at loads much lower than expected. As a result complex maintenance procedures are required and a significantly greater safety margin than for other materials. Our vision is to create a paradigm shift by realising a new generation of high performance composites that overcome the key limitation of conventional composites: their inherent lack of ductility. We will design, manufacture and evaluate a range of composite systems with the ability to fail gradually, undergoing large deformations whilst still carrying load. Energy will be absorbed by ductile or pseudo-ductile response, analogous to yielding in metals, with strength and stiffness maintained, and clear evidence of damage. This will eliminate the need for very low design strains to cater for barely visible impact damage, providing a step change in composite performance, as well as overcoming the intrinsic brittleness that is a major barrier to their wider adoption. These materials will provide greater reliability and safety, together with reduced design and maintenance requirements, and longer service life. True ductility will allow new manufacturing methods, such as press forming, that offer high volumes and greater flexibility.To achieve such an ambitious outcome will require a concerted effort to develop new composite constituents and exploit novel architectures. The programme will scope, prioritise, develop, and combine these approaches, to achieve High Performance Ductile Composite Technology (HiPerDuCT).