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As a kind of high performance polymer with excellent mechanical strength, high temperature property and chemical resistance, the polyether-ether-ketone (PEEK) and its composites are the promising candidates that can satisfy the demands for high stiff and lightweight in aerospace industry. So it is very attractive to fabricate PEEK and its composites parts with additive manufacturing technology, especially the selective laser sintering (SLS), due to its advantage on the fabrication of the parts with complex geometries. However, the strengths of the PEEK and its composites prepared by SLS are obviously lower than their injection molded parts and the laser sintering kinetics of the PEEK composites is seldom studied. In this paper, to fabricate the carbon fibers (CF) reinforced PEEK composites with high strength by SLS, the sintering kinetics of CF/PEEK composites was thoroughly studied based on the high temperature rheological behavior. A novel effective melting zone was defined by combining the simulated temperature distribution with the viscosity-temperature relationship and used to predict the process planning. Finally, the calculation results were validated by employing the simulation parameters in experiments and the tensile strength of CF/PEEK composites reached 109 ± 1 MPa with an elasticity modulus of 7365 ± 468 MPa, which is 85% higher than injection molded pure PEEK. Therefore, methods in this work could be considered as a complement to the numerical analysis of SLS process and the reinforced CF/PEEK composites may be used in aerospace industry for the structure optimization and lightweight design with complex geometries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overall performance of curvilinear fiber reinforced composite structures (CFRCSs) can be designed by adjusting the local fiber orientation and content. In this paper, an optimized design method based on stress gradient distribution for CFRCSs was proposed to improve the efficiency in strength of continuous fiber reinforced composites. The mechanism of fiber content regulation in continuous fiber reinforced composites 3D printing was studied. The adaptive feed calculation method of resin was proposed, and the 3D printing of CFRCSs was realized. A 3D printed composite perforated plate with a hole under tensile loading was optimized and fabricated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. After the optimized design, the maximum stress concentration factor was reduced by 36%, and the ultimate tensile strength was increased by 42%. Through the proposed optimization design method, the fiber content distribution corresponds to the stress distribution, and the fiber direction distribution corresponds to the maximum principal stress direction distribution. At the same time, the stress was redistributed to reduce the stress concentration. Therefore, the ultimate strength was improved. The optimized design method and 3D printing method of CFRCSs have potential application prospects in aerospace, automotive and other fields. Image 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]