Stepan Lomov
Professor / Research Manager
Coordinator, Composite Materials Group; Toray Chair on Composite Materials
Department of Materials Engineering, KU Leuven

Thanks to their hierarchical organization spanning through multiple scales hierarchical composites show exemplary resilience to failure
combined with a plethora of different functions. This toughness improvement is generally attributed to the additional energy dissipated by the debonding and pull-out of CNTs from the matrix although other mechanisms are also known to contribute to it. In this work, we use a computational framework to reveal different toughening mechanisms and to understand their relative contributions to the toughness of composites with CNT grafted fibers. These mechanisms occur at different length scales and concurrently. Our computational experiments show that there are mainly three contributing toughening mechanisms: damage diffusion and energy dissipation through CNT debonding and fibre/matrix interfacial debonding, with the first one playing a dominant role. The simulation resulted in a “damage map” plotting the occurrence of different damage modes in relation to the CNT strength and CNT interface strength.

Co-authored by: Qiang Liu, Stepan V. Lomov, Larissa Gorbatikh
 

Biography
Professor Stepan V. Lomov graduated from St Petersburg Polytechnic as MSc in Applied Mathematics in 1978 and got his PhD (1985) and Dr Habille (1995) Degrees in Textile Material Science. Since 2000 he is a professor of KU Leuven. he coordinates the Composite Materials Group in the Department of Materials Engineering at KU Leuven and holds Toray Chair on Composite Materials.

His research interests include:

• - Structural mechanics of textiles, composites and biomaterials
• -Multi-level modelling of heterogeneous media
• - Internal geometry, mechanical properties, permeability of textiles and composites
• - Development of "virtual material" software
• - Experimental studies of properties of textiles and composites
• - Advanced reinforcements (textile, 3D, nano…)

Hosted By:

Professor Brian L. Wardle, MIT-Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics