Wood composites
Wood is one of the materials mankind used first in its early days, and it combines renewability, pleasing aesthetics, and easy processability and formability for wide variety of applications. However, the strongly direction-dependent properties and usually unsatisfactory durability, especially of fast-growing woods, limit their widespread technical use. Wooden components often exhibit brittle failure without previous warning, which makes high factors of safety necessary to ensure sufficient support framework safety.
Demonstrator example for a textile reinforcement on a wooden node structure
Hybrid high-performance materials as a combination of wood and textile reinforcement structures offer the possibility to overcome said disadvantages and allow a defined, application-adapted adjustment of characteristics, e.g. by locally reinforced connection points or improving the mechanical characteristics of profiles perpendicular to the fiber direction by means of a large-area reinforcement using textile structures. This creates the preconditions for a construction of highly loadable, spatial wood support structures.
The ITM can use its broad experience in the development of textile reinforcement structures, e.g. based on renewable resource materials and high-performance materials to ensure a reproducible forming of wooden panels into complex-shape components, along with a simultaneous reinforcement. The reinforcement structures are applied to the wood by means of duromer resin systems. During the geometry formation, the textile structures act as tension belts and prevent crack formation in the wood. The textile structures thus replace the metal tools used as tension belts before. After geometry formation, the same textile structures act as reinforcements, significantly increasing the mechanical characteristics of the components.
We would be happy to contribute our experience and know-how, especially in the field of innovative textile technologies and functional structures, and composite formation, to your development of innovative and load-bearing, textile-reinforced wooden composites.
Contact person:
Mr Prof. Dr.-Ing. Chokri Cherif
Head of the Textiles for Lightweight Construction research group
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