Carbon-fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) and glass-fibre reinforced plastics (GFRP) are widely used for components in the aviation and wind energy industries and suffer from damages or wear during operation. As soon as automobiles containing CFRP parts will go into large batch production and enter the market in the near future, the need for reliable repair and post-production processes will increase.
One step in such a repair chain or post process can be nanosecond(ns)-pulsed UV-laser macro-structuring to prepare damaged surfaces for a composite bonded repair. It is important for a bonded repair that machined areas exhibit sufficient wettability for an adhesive to achieve optimal distribution on the substrate in order to sustain high shear strength.
In this article several combinations of laser and process parameters will be investigated regarding the processability of glass- and carbon-fibre reinforced epoxy of unidirectional (UD) ply build up. The processability will be evaluated by measuring the surface roughness and the contact angle to predict the wettability of the surfaces.
The evaluated parameter sets will be used to process bonded butt lap joint coupons for shear strength tests, in order to verify the suitability of laser processes for a bonded repair strategy of composites.