Continuous manufacturing of CFRP sheets by rolling for rapid fabrication of long CFRP products

The application of CFRP (carbon fiber reinforced plastic) parts in the automotive industry is limited by their labor-intensive and time-consuming manufacturing processes. Moreover, the strong demand for long products, such as components with a length of 25 m used in high-speed railroad vehicles, requires the manufacturing of long CFRP sheets, which are extremely difficult to produce using the conventional autoclave process. To achieve the rapid production of long CFRP products, a method of continuously manufacturing CFRP sheets by rolling is proposed in this study, and the effects of the preheating and curing times as well as the gap between rollers on the properties of the produced CFRP sheets such as void fraction, thickness, strength and formability are investigated. The CFRP sheets produced by the newly proposed rolling process have comparable performance characteristics such as void fraction, strength, formability, energy absorption and load tolerance to those of the CFRP sheets fabricated by the autoclave process. Owing to its much higher manufacturing efficiency, the rolling process is expected to replace the conventional time-consuming autoclave process for the fabrication of long CFRP sheets for a wider range of engineering applications.