“Core Range is a simple and complete range of bigHead fasteners for both surface bonded and embedded applications,” explained bigHead’s managing director, Matthew Stevens. “Most importantly, this new range comes with application performance data and composite design guidelines to simplify product selection and composite joint design. For the first time, design engineers will have the key information at their finger-tips: fastener + performance data + composite design rules.”
When working in composites, engineers find it hard to predict how a fastener will perform under load. Without any industry standards, the answers to critical questions such as, “How much load can a bonded or embedded fastener withstand?” or, “How will it fail?” come down to guesswork and time-consuming trials and tests. bigHead’s Core Range now provides engineers with the key information to answer these questions and streamline their design process.
As the behaviour of composite joints are so hard to predict, bigHead’s design rules help engineers avoid costly surprises later on in the process.
“We have seen many examples of designers being caught out by failures in the field. Very often this is because they have no performance data to rely on or design rules to follow. Some engineers might make assumptions, perhaps based on their experience of working in metal, that turn out to be misleading for composites,” commented Dr Lawrence Cook, development engineer at bigHead. “bigHead’s Core Range not only makes the process from initial design to final application easier, but helps customers avoid costly errors in the field.”
