Influence of the automotive paint shop on mechanical properties of continuous fibre-reinforced thermoplastics.

Abstract Continuous fibre-reinforced thermoplastics offer advantages over their thermoset counterparts. Thermoplastics are often overlooked, as they must pass through the high temperature automotive paint shop for application in structural body parts. Tensile-, flexural-, and impact properties of polyamide 6, polyamide 66, and polyphthalamide reinforced with woven glass fibre fabrics were investigated. It is shown that the entire painting process mostly yielded a predominant improvement on the investigated mechanical properties of glass fibre-reinforced polyamide 6 due to a raised degree in crystallinity. There is no unanimous trend visible for glass fibre-reinforced polyamide 66. The examined shear properties of glass fibre-reinforced polyphthalamide were decreased by the painting process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]