Manufacturing deviations in Hydrofoils and their impact on performance: Investigating the Manufacturing deviations of the Nacra 17 Hydrofoil and their impact on performance

The Nacra 17 is a foiling catamaran selected to compete in the 2024 Olympic Games. The Nacra 17 is a one-design class, which requires all equipment to be identical. The Dutch Olympic team found through testing the bending stiffness that there is a slight difference in how each of their hydrofoils performed. The question was asked: What are the...

FLAx REinforced Aluminium (FLARE): A bio-based Fibre Metal Laminate alternative combining impact resistance and vibration damping

Fibre metal laminates (FML) were initially conceived as a hybrid material, aiming to create synergy between the impact resistance of metals and excellent fatigue resistance of fibre reinforced polymers. The purpose of this approach was to overcome the limitations of single-material structures. However, despite its considerable promise, the use...

Including Imperfections within the Displacement-based Koiter Methodology

The Koiter methodology is a reduced-order model that can predict the initial post-buckling characteristics of structures. Incorporating the Koiter approach within finite element simulations resulted in challenges. These included mesh sensitive initial post-buckling coefficients, computationally expensive high-order derivatives, and phenomena...

Frontal Polymerization in Fiber Reinforced Polymers: Influence of varying fiber volume fraction and varying geometry

Frontal polymerization (FP) has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional bulk curing methods in recent years for manufacturing high-performance fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites. The energy utilized in this self-propagating curing strategy is solely derived from the exothermic enthalpy of polymerization, making it potentially...

Evaluation of Grid-Stiffened Structures For Applications on Drones

The use of Grid-stiffened structures has been increasing in the space industry over the last decade. Thanks to it is high specific mechanical properties and excellent damage tolerance characteristics, researchers also started looking into the potential of using them for aeronautical applications. However, not much has been done to investigate...

Automating Inclusion of Production Considerations in the Conceptual Design of Aircraft Structures

Considerations that decide producibility of a design are an important part of the design process, and must be included in the early design stages to ensure that these designs can be realised. Not including these considerations carries the risk of incurring additional costs and delays at later stages of product development because of design...

Discontinuous Long Fibre Reinforced Thermoplastic for Additive Manufacturing

Current large-scale additive manufacturing extruders use short reinforcing fibre-filled thermoplastic pellets, which marginally improve the mechanical performance but are too short to exploit the strength of the fibres fully. Long fibre pellets have much higher potential strength, and the development of higher strength materials could create...

A Fibre-Path Generation Algorithm for Fibre-Steered Variable Stiffness Laminates

The development of novel materials has been of great interest to the aerospace industry in the pursuit of efficiency and cost reduction. Fibre-steered variable stiffness laminates have promising characteristics due to the ability to better tailor designs for expected loading, as the fibre orientation can be varied within a layer. This thesis was...

Experimental Data-Driven Design of Sustainable Bulk Moulding Compounds

Bio-based composites have been a viable material choice in aerospace, automobile and construction industries over the past few decades. From day-to-day products like spoons and chairs to the construction of rocket parts, bio-based composites find their applications due to their mechanically enhanced, cost-effective and lightweight structures,...

Modeling the Effects of Blade Dissimilarity on Rotor Vibrations for CH-47 Chinook Using a Viscous Vortex Particle Method

This work is a part of the Automated Rotor Blade Inspection (ARBI) project. ARBI aims to improve the rotorcraft RTB process with novel rotor blade measurement equipment such as 3D scanning, thermography and shearography. The research aims to quantify the effects of changes in blade properties on rotor vibration levels for CH-47 Chinook. This is...

Buckling of Isotropic and Composite Cylindrical Shells with Circular Cutouts

Predicting the critical buckling load of cylindrical shells with circular cutouts subjected to uniform axial compression is an important part of the structural design in the aerospace industry as buckling significantly reduces the load-carrying capability of the structure. A cutout constitutes a major disruption in the shell geometry, and...

Preventing Injuries of High Speed Marine Craft Operators: Incorporating Spinal Injury Models in the Analyses of Various Seat Suspension Principles

On board of High Speed marine Craft (HSC), the crew and the passengers are exposed to high levels of Whole Body Vibrations (WBV) and large magnitude Repeated mechanical Shocks (RS) caused by the motions of the craft. The HSCs are typically 10 meters long, capable of reaching a maximum speed up to 50 knots and widely used by various maritime...

Structural design of a VTOL twin- tiltwing drone concept with a distributed hybrid electric propulsion system

Parametric design and optimization model: For offshore wind turbine monopile foundations with GFRP tower

The offshore wind energy market is highly dynamic and one of the major challenges is to become more cost competitive against other sources of energy. The support structure of an offshore wind turbine shows a high potential for further cost reduction. Jules Dock is investigating in the replacement of a steel tower on a monopile foundation by a...

Acoustic Emission Monitoring: of Offshore Wind Turbine Support Structures for Detection and Localization of Fatigue Crack Growth

Offshore wind turbines are used more and more for the production of our electricity. The wind turbines are located in a remote and harsh environment, and are subject to heavy cyclic loading, which may cause fatigue in the support structures. Periodic inspections are required to assess the structural health of the wind turbines. Acoustic Emission...

Saving weight and increasing performance by introducing a composite gangway for the Ampelmann system: Creating a producible and certifiable design

With a changing market for offshore crew transfer systems the current Ampelmann systems are vulnerable for competitors. One of the downsides of the current system is its influence on the ship due to the system mass. A lightweight re-design of the current steel gangway using composites could start an overall weight decrease. A composite gangway...

The effect of X-core foam processing on surface defects in carbon fibre/epoxy sandwich composites: Redefining sandwich manufacturing with X-core

X-core is a novel foam core material developed by Donkervoort Automobielen, it enables a unique one-shot process for seamless composite sandwich structures with mould-defined features all-around. The foam is co-cured to carbon fibre/epoxy prepregs, in this form the process is currently used to make car components for the Donkervoort D8 GTO RS....

Design Optimization of Variable-Stiffness Composite Panels under Thermomechanical Loads

Striving to improve structural efficiency the aerospace industry shows increasing interest in variable-stiffness composite laminates. Advanced fiber placement is a hybrid manufacturing technique that offers the flexibility of both filament winding and automated tape laying. With the development of this novel system curved tows can be placed and...