The damage-tolerant composites project, which involves researchers from five European countries, will create more damage-resistant composite materials for bridges, buildings, wind turbine blades and offshore structures.
The DACOMAT project aims to extend the service life of bridges and reduce the life cycle costs of bridges and other large infrastructure.
For an old concrete bridge, the narrow lane must be widened to accommodate more traffic pedestrians and meet new standards. This has become the current status quo of the bridge. It turns out that without further support, the bridge cannot support larger The weight of the concrete superstructure leads to the costly construction of bridge pillars or bridge piers, and the cost can be completely built a new bridge.
Jens Kjær Jørgensen, project leader of Schindler Industries in Trondheim, Norway, said: 'Under the guidance of EU Horizon 2020, research teams from five different countries are conducting material studies to make deck extensions and other fibers. Bridge elements made of reinforced plastic. 'This research project, which began in January 2018 and will continue until December 2021, is called DACOMAT, a damage-resistant composite material.
The purpose of DACOMAT is to develop more predictable and low-cost composite materials that are resistant to damage and destructive, especially those used for large load-bearing structures such as bridges, buildings, wind turbine blades and offshore structures. Materials developed and Condition monitoring solutions will provide high tolerance and high damage tolerance for manufacturing defects. This will greatly reduce the cost of manufacturing and maintaining large composite structures. Project results mainly include: Development of reliability design criteria and modeling tools for critically-loaded composite structures; Material identification guidelines; Structural health monitoring (SHM) and damage assessment solutions; Life cycle analysis (LCA) methods for large composite structures.
Jørgensen said: 'The project is being coordinated by STENF. In addition to several universities, participating companies include Polynt Composites (Carpentersville, IL, USA), (Stanford, CT, USA, Hexcel), Carbures (Cádiz, Spain) , 3b Fiberglass (Battice, Belgium), LM Wind Energy (Lunderskov, Denmark) and DNV GL (Oslo, Norway). Participants will work together to ensure that cracks are the least likely to damage composite bridge components and wind turbine blade strength. Say, The project aims to produce composite materials and make it more difficult to transmit than existing alternative fracturing cracks. The purpose is to use the developed composite materials to make the bridge's service life longer than traditional structures, while reducing the life cycle cost by 30%. For wind power Turbine blades, whose goal is a 30% increase in life and a 50% reduction in cost.'
Over time, in order to gain more knowledge about the nature of the material, The project also aims to develop technologies to ensure the use of optical and acoustic sensors to monitor the propagation of cracks. The results of this project will also apply to offshore installations and other structures that need to withstand harsh environmental conditions.