Quasi-isotropic aligned discontinuous fibre composites with the hiperdif (high performance discontinuous fibres) method

Highly aligned discontinuous fibre composites are truly beneficial for mass production applications, e.g. automotive and sporting goods, offering better formability and comparable mechanical properties with continuous fibre reinforced composites. The HiPerDiF (High Performance Discontinuous Fibre) method, invented at University of Bristol, is able to produce highly aligned discontinuous fibre prepregs and composites thanks to its unique fibre orientation mechanism. Unidirectional composite materials manufactured with the HiPerDiF method showed high mechanical properties previously reported in [1]. However, it is usually necessary to balance the load-carrying capability in multiple directions. In this study, the HiPerDiF was used to manufacture a tape-type unidirectional highly aligned discontinuous fibre prepreg from 3 mm fibres. A quasi-isotropic laminate composite was prepared by laying up the tape-type aligned discontinuous fibre prepregs and tested in tension to characterise the mechanical properties and compared with a randomly oriented short fibre composite.