Co-authors​ :

 Hamed ABDOLI (NEW ZEALAND), Olaf DIEGEL , Simon BICKERTON (NEW ZEALAND) 

Carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRP) are increasingly utilised in combination with plastics and metals, to manufacture hybrid components. Although hybrid components provide a combination of the advantages from the constituent materials, there are some challenges for the manufacture of high-quality hybrid components, including potentially weak interfacial bonding between the constituent materials. This paper presents a study focused on enhancing the interfacial strength of hybrid components by using additive manufacturing (AM) to manipulate the surface topology of a substrate component. Specifically, the study involved conducting experiments on a nylon/CFRP hybrid component in which the nylon substrates were manufactured with a controlled surface topology using polymer powder bed fusion. The mechanical testing study revealed several key findings, including an increase in bonding strength by modifying the substrate surface features, and significant improvements in out-of-plane interlaminar bonding strength by adding substrate surface features such as pins or fluorite lattices. The findings also showed that there was a negligible difference between pin structure substrates with different unit cell sizes in terms of the out-of-plane interface strength. However, there was a significant reduction in strength when increasing the unit cell size for fluorite structure substrates. These results highlight the potential benefits of using AM technologies to enhance the interfacial strength of hybrid components and suggest directions for future research in this area.