PhD title for Sebastiaan van den Berg

Sebastiaan van den Berg successfully defended his PhD research "Induction heating simulations of carbon fabric-reinforced thermoplastics: On the significance of electrical conductivity characterization" on the 25th of June, 2024.

Induction welding is a promising joining technique for carbon-reinforced thermoplastic composites (TPCs), as it can be automated, can meet high production rate demands, and reduces stress at the interfaces of components in comparison with traditional joining techniques. Sebastiaan's work aimed to develop an accurate and computationally efficient simulation method for predicting temperature distribution within the TPC laminates during induction heating.

The major result of this work is an approach to predicting heat generation during induction heating of arbitrary carbon fabric-reinforced TPCs. The proposed method first measures the anisotropic electrical conductivity of the composite using the six-probe method, which can then be incorporated into induction heating simulations. For quasi-isotropic laminates, the electrical conductivity description can be simplified to an isotropic representation based on measured electrical conductivity values. This simplification significantly reduces computational time while maintaining accuracy.

This research was supervised by Remko Akkerman and Martin Luckabauer from the Production Technology research group at University of Twente and the research was performed in close cooperation with TPRC.

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