CREATING NEW COMPOSITE MATERIALS BY 3D PRINTING
Ismet Baran, Assistant Professor in the Production Technology Department, is an expert on composite materials and in particular knows a lot about the characterisation and production of fibre-reinforced polymer composites and their mechanical performance. Something essential for generating renewable energy.
"My main focus is wind energy and battling climate change," says Ismet Baran. His expertise is composite materials, more specifically the characterization and manufacturing of fiber-reinforced polymer composites and their mechanical performance – all of which is essential for the production of renewable energy. "Renewable energy is a powerful tool in our fight against climate change," says the researcher. "And I believe that wind energy has a lot of potential. However, in order to produce reliable and robust wind energy, we need reliable and robust wind turbine blades." Ismet Baran’s research contributes to developing a new generation of these rotor blades. "Current blades have the diameter of 220 meters. To put this in comparison, the Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall. This shows how gigantic the wind turbine blades are. Yet, we need even larger blades to produce more power and meet our climate goals."
The scientist’s work relates to the design and production of these giant composite materials. "It is a major challenge," says Baran. "We don’t have a proper understanding on the relationship between manufacturing process settings and resulting part properties. As you can imagine, that could lead to unexpected failures in rotor blades, causing many issues. We need turbines that can keep functioning properly for more than twenty years. That is an ambitious goal – to which I’m contributing with my research."
Baran’s research focuses on analyzing the microstructures and processing of composite materials. Essentially, the UT scientist aims to determine what techniques and materials are needed for the wind turbine blades of the future. The Assistant Professor was awarded the VENI grant for his research into characterization techniques and prediction models for strength of these composite materials. Still within the same theme, Ismet Baran is slightly shifting the focus of his work. "As my next step, I’d like to focus more on novel manufacturing processes, such as 3D printing of composite materials for wind turbine applications. I’ve been looking into producing new composite materials using 3D printing, which would allow us to create high strength, geometrically complex and robust structures for energy applications."
Education
Ismet Baran teaches Design, Production and Materials course within the Mechanical Engineering Master’s programme. ‘The focus of the course is for students to learn how to design complex structures using composite materials, but more importantly I want students to learn how to independently research a complex subject that they are not familiar with,’ says the UT scientist. ‘My research also plays an integral part in my teaching. I invite companies to give lectures and therefore bring the real-life applications to the classroom. My main goal, however, is to educate students to be curious and independent.’
About
Ismet Baran is a Tenured Assistant Professor in Polymer Composite Characterization, Processing and Performance in the Production Technology group of the Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2014. He has acquired the prestigious VENI grant from NWO and is the PI of InLEP project funded by TKI Wind op Zee in the field of wind turbine blade production. His scientific projects are in collaboration with DTU and LM Wind Power, a world-leading manufacturer of wind turbine blades. He is the author of the book “Pultrusion: State-of-the-art Process Models’. Dr. Baran was awarded the “ESAFORM PhD Prize for Industrial Research” from European Scientific Association for Material Forming (ESAFORM) and he received the “Young Scientist Award” from the Danish Plastics Federation.
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