Infrared Welding of Continuous Glass Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastics – Approaches to use the Fibers in the Joint

Thermoplastic prepregs that are also known as organo sheets are processed in presses and formed to half shells. Larger components can be produced by joining the half shells, which results in hollow bodies. However, current manufacturing technologies allow only cap profile shaped joints, which cause fiber deflections in the joint plane. This paper shows that overlapping infrared welds in organo sheets enable weld strengths close to the interlaminar shear strengths of the unwelded materials and thus a fiber utilization across the joint plane. By using high welding pressures, a matrix depletion and a change of the fiber alignment in the weld plane may occur which causes low weld strengths. Therefore, criteria for the successful welding were defined and various possibilities to optimize the weld strengths were investigated