Thermoforming Complex Parts from Unconsolidated and Consolidated Polypropylene/Glass Fibre Fabrics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thermoforming of unconsolidated and consolidated polypropylene/glass fibre fabrics was studied for two mould geometries, i.e. a square mould and a mould with three studs. The principal objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of direct thermoforming of unconsolidated fabrics in complex moulds, since this process offers the potential of reducing the cost of the raw material by eliminating the separate consolidation step performed prior to moulding. In this work, the unconsolidated and consolidated fabrics plies were heated in a convection oven and then quickly transferred to a press to be simultaneously conformed and (re-)consolidated using a rubber punch and a metal cavity. Results show that similar product quality (evaluated by the void content) can be obtained with unconsolidated and consolidated fabrics once conformation to the mould shape is achieved. A minimal forming temperature of 215 °C is required to achieve conformation to the mould shape, while minimal forming pressures of 2 and 3 MPa must be applied to achieve the same objective for the consolidated and unconsolidated fabric, respectively. Increasing the punch hardness, varying the fabric orientation and increasing the number of vents could reduce the pressure necessary to produce conformation to the mould shape.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".