Composites introduction - Fusion 360 Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this course, Composite Manufacturing Design to Consumer Product, I've gone ahead and broken it up into three parts. So in part one, we're going to be talking about carbon fiber as a material, how it's manufactured, how we process it, the different styles of manufacturing with it, so that you have a real understanding of the material and how we can best use it. In part two, we're going to be talking about how to design for it, how to simulate for materials early on, and how that whole design process for composites works. And in part three, we're going to be talking about the manufacturing process of the composites and getting it out the door. I'm going to guide you through with an actual consumer part that we're working on. We're going to be designing and manufacturing a 12 inch push bike also known as a balanced bike. This is a product that I've really wanted to make for my son and thought this was the perfect opportunity we can show you the whole process of how we do this. Composite is truly an amazing material and it has famously been used for light weighting. It's very, very light. It's very high tensile strength and that gives it a lot of really good properties when you talk about light weighting. And I think historically that's always been the draw to composites. Now composites is made from multiple layers of fabric material that is layered on top of each other. And then it is compressed and held together with a matrix. In most cases you're typically using an approximate material and that's what creates a structure. Now, one of the amazing properties of composite structures is that you can manipulate the strengths and characteristics of the material. So you have a fiber, so you can understand that it works kind of like wood and it has a grain has a direction of its strength and you can manipulate that in ways that benefit you. So you can have it have high strength in one direction but yet flexible and another direction. You can use different materials that have higher tensile strength versus higher abrasion characteristics. You can very much manipulate the structure to tune it to your liking. It's one of the big draws and composites. With the given properties of composites it was a natural fit in the aerospace industry because you could lightweight so effectively because the material was so light and such high tensile strength. And it was so modular that it really allowed aerospace engineers to tune the parts for their exact applications. And also given the fact that in a lot of aerospace projects the budgets are just massive. They could absorb the actual cost of dealing with these types of materials and designing for them. Now, from there, we started seeing a transition into automotive, especially F1 again massive budget light weighting is so key, tuning the materials is so key. It was a natural evolution of the process. From there we kind of started seeing it going into sporting goods. Again, it's this whole idea of being able to tune the properties, making it light, making it strong really making it work the way you want it to. And in the sporting industry you saw an immediate increase in performance and results. Those results are instantaneous. People started using it and immediately started doing better. So it was definitely very beneficial in the sporting industry. Now, today we're starting to actually see this a lot in automotive. It's kind of surprising because if you think about where it started and where it's coming now the cost of manufacturing for composites come down so drastically on top of that the designing for it has become more accessible to people. So in the automotive industry we're starting to see it being used more and more and more, and actually effective not just in hundred thousand dollar cars, we're seeing an every day consumer cars. And the automotive industry, especially given the fact of electric vehicles nowadays and high efficiency vehicles, it comes into play because we can design cars that are lighter, stronger and more efficient so that, you know, they consume less. So it's been a big factor in the automotive industry and it kind of works again with scales because now the automotive industry is using it. They're spending so much more in research and development. It's scaling even faster and it's working its way into more and more and more consumer products today.