Design And Properties Of Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Composites Used For The Laptop Shell Materials

As laptops become increasingly popular and are of high performance, people would paymore attention to appearance of laptops when buying computers. The appearance of laptopslargely depends on the shell material. However, the shell material used in laptops is neitherenvironmental friendly nor at a low price, which may be driven out of the market or limit themarket share. Therefore, it is of great interest to develop new shell material which is attractive inprice and quality.This paper focuses on the dyeing of glass fiber fabrics with carbon black and moldingprocess of glass fiber fabric/epoxy resin composites, compares different dyeing processes andmolding processes and conforms optimum dyeing parameters for glass fabrics with uniform andstable colour and optimum molding parameters for the composites with good mechanicalproperties. Finally, the rationality of optimum parameters is verified.Carbon black is used in the dyeing of glass fabrics. Four factors including particle size ofcarbon black, concentration of carbon black, dyeing time and additives are studied individuallyto achieve black glass fabrics with uniform and stable colour. The optimum parameters fordyeing are:16h grinding of carbon black,0.8%weight of carbon black,60min dyeing andaddition of5%water soluble epoxy resin.Vulcanizing machine is used in the molding process of black glass fabric/epoxy resincomposites. DSC test of epoxy resin with curing agent is done, and the optimum curingtemperature of resin is96℃. Then, molding parameters including molding pressure, moldingtemperature, molding time and layer number of glass fabrics are studied in the compositemanufacture and composites with different thickness are made. For use in notebook computer shell, composites with thickness of0.96mm and1.90mm are selected, and tensile test and impacttest of these two composites are done. Composites with96℃molding temperature,2h moldingtime and40Kg the molding pressure is1.90mm in thickness, and gets better impact propertieswith11.086kJ/m2impact toughness. This indicates that the impact resistant of composite is betterwhen resin content increases. Composites with96℃molding temperature,1h molding time and0.70MPa the molding pressure is0.96mm in thickness, and gets better tensile properties with171.14Mpa tensile strength.