Background
In April of 2023, I joined my university’s FSAE team out of a desire to acquire practical hands-on engineering experience.
At the time, the team was coming out of a dormant phase, preparing to start developing a new vehicle after years of inactivity.
This presented a unique opportunity to experience a product’s entire lifecycle from conceptualization and design, to manufacturing and testing.
That spring, I became acquainted with the scope of work that I would be doing the following semester.
I had not yet had the experience of actually doing a layup. To establish a foundation, I took a three-day course at my local community college that fall. This training equpped me with the essential skills and techniques for working with carbon fiber.
I learned the process of fabricating a panel, starting with preparing the plate, followed by correclty layering the plys by interpreting the layup schedule, bagging the setup to ensure proper vacuum sealing, and finally curing the panel.
This is a clipboard I made using the wet layup method. Wet lay-up involves manually impregnating the plys with resin using a tool such as a roller or squeegee. The other type of layup is prepreg (pre-impregnated). Prepreg carbon fiber already contains resin that is partially cured. It is ready to be placed onto a mold and then fully cured in an oven.
Wet layups are good for applications that involve more complex shapes where relief cuts might be required.
Prepreg fiber eliminates variables such as consistency since it has a controlled resin-to-fiber ratio, ensuring consistent mechanical properties.