UCONN Senior Design Job Ticket

UCONN Senior Design Job Ticket

Sponsoring Company: Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

Project Title: Surface Readiness for Adhesion

Contacts:Dr. Xiaomei Yu / / 203 386-2954

This is a joint project between Materials Science Engineering and Mechanical Engineering

The Engineering Challenge:

Aircraft are built with lightweight materials, such as magnesium, aluminum, and composite materials, which are susceptibleto environmental degradation such as corrosion and have to be protected with multilayer coating system. When applying coating on top of the substrate, surface readiness is critical to ensure coating adhesion. Traditionally surface readiness is ensured by surface preparation including cleaning and activation, which are verified using practical methods such as water break test. However, the traditional water break test has its limitations such as sensitive to surface geometry, water quality, and type of surface contaminations and may provide false surface readiness information and cause paint peeling problem which could be a very expensive problem. On the other hand, surface readiness is important to ensure satisfactory bonding strength and effectively joining different materials using adhesive techniques. Therefore, effective characterization of surface readiness are critical for both coating and structure bondingadhesions.

Description of Problem/Project:

Instantaneous characterization of substrate surface to be painted and/or bonded and ensure surface readiness is critical to ensure adhesion and minimizefailure, such as paint peelingduring manufacturing process. This project is to establish effective and practical surface analytical techniques for various substrate surfaces such as anodized aluminum and composite and to design testing methods for these analytical techniques that allow for predicting surface aging.

Expected Deliverables:

Surface chemistry of anodized aluminum alloysduring aging process; before and after reactivation

Characterization technique for verification of aluminum anodize surface readiness

Surface chemistry of Plexiglas substrate before and after preparation

Design, fabricate and test specimens to qualitatively measure the surface readiness of Plexiglas specimens for a range of surface conditions and corresponding coating adhesion.

Characterization technique and model for verification of Plexiglas panel surface readiness.

Surface chemistry of composite surface before and after preparation.

Characterization technique for verification of composite surface readiness.

Design , fabricate and test specimens to measure adhesive bond strength for a range of surface conditions and adhesives.

Attach photos/slides

Multilayer system

Is there a specific software package required for the projects? Y ___ N _X__

Which package (name/version) ______

U.S. Citizen/Person (green card) Required? Y_X___ N ____

Will Export Controlled data be used in project (EAR/ITAR) Y _____N_X__

NDA/IP Agreements required? Y _X__ N __

Other considerations: