Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Composites: Machining Aspects and Opportunities for Manufacturing Industries

Abstract

Carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) composite is becoming popular in supply and demand trend among the industry players especially in aerospace industry. This material can be applied into various applications in the industries due to the features such as strength-to-weight ratio and rigidity, which is suitable for the aircraft with the highest weight ratio or low weight for high-performance automobile racing. This chapter covers comprehensively regarding CFRP and their machinability. The first section explains three major types of composite materials and its features including a brief highlight about the development of composite materials. Next section covers the fundamental of machining characteristics and the tool development, which is focusing on the machining of fibre reinforced polymer composites. Furthermore, this section focuses on drilling aspects because it is the most challenging machining process compared with sawing, planning, turning, milling and other conventional machining process. The third section highlights the development of drilled hole measurement techniques, which focusing on the prominent development of the delamination factor (Fd) ratio. The final part summarizes the outlook of exploiting this composite material in term of machining parameters. This chapter reviews the experimental progress in drilling of CFRP composites, which is intended to help readers to obtain the latest views in order to develop the appropriate machining parameters.