Specialist resources
This content is designed for a more specialist audience such as composites specialists in academia and industry. It includes publications and more in-depth technical content. If you’re just looking for an overview, head over to our public resources.
About the project
The High Performance Ductile Composite Technologies (HiPerDuCT) £6M programme grant is a collaboration between the Advanced Composites Centre for Innovation and Science (now Bristol Composites Institute ) and The Composites Centre at Imperial College London. It was funded through the EPSRC call for ‘Creativity in Composites Engineering’ in 2010 to address longer-term challenges to fully realise the potential of composite materials.
Composites have become established as very high performance materials and continue to expand rapidly into new markets and applications but a fundamental limitation of current composites is their inherent brittleness. Failure is usually sudden and catastrophic, with little warning or residual load carrying capacity.
Aims
The aims of HiPerDuCT are therefore to design, manufacture and evaluate a range of composite systems with a ductile or pseudo-ductile response, while maintaining the strength and stiffness for which composites are so highly prized.
The team
The team is led by Professor Michael Wisnom (University of Bristol) and Professor Alexander Bismarck (Imperial College London), and supported by partners including BAE Systems, Dstl, Halliburton, Hexcel, Mouchel, Rolls-Royce and Vestas.