With increasing demands on environmental protection and the reduction of CO2 emissions in the automotive sector, the development of innovative lightweight design strategies for vehicles is a significant research focus. Therefore, fibre-reinforced plastics (FRP) are increasingly being used because of their high lightweight potential. For enhanced material utilisation and cost reduction, FRP is often applied on metal structures according to the load cases. To produce such hybrid structures, the "hybrid prepreg press process" was investigated at the Chair of Automotive Lightweight Design at the University of Paderborn. It is an intrinsic manufacturing process in which the joining and shaping of the metal and FRP components will take place simultaneously, and therefore reduce cycle times.

As part of a DFG-funded collaborative research project “HerKoLas”, the process parameters of the prepreg pressing process is being further narrowed down and optimised, so that a component-like structure such as a hat profile made of laser-structured aluminium sheets and a thermoset CFRP prepreg can be formed simultaneously. In this presentation, the results of the basic investigations are presented and discussed. 3-point bending tests were carried out to investigate the influence of the consolidation parameters (temperature, pressure, and time) on the mechanical properties of the CFRP-laminate and the laminate quality was evaluated at the microscopic level. Results so far show that the flexural strength increases with the increased pressure and the laminate quality is improved. To determine the bond strength between the aluminium sheet and the CFRP-laminate, the Edge Shear test was used. In addition, thermal deformation in the fibre-metal-laminate due to different thermal expansion was also considered. For this purpose, different manufacturing strategies were used to handle the challenge. Finally, all the test results are then evaluated based on statistical methods to determine the best set of parameters for the subsequent manufacturing of complex structures.