Project Bondless — Carpentry Joints for Polymer Composites

Bondless was a group research project investigating whether traditional carpentry joints could be adapted for polymer composite structures. We designed and manufactured a range of joints — including mortise and tenon, dovetail, Domino and a topology-optimised spiral joint — in PLA and carbon-fibre reinforced nylon, then compared their performance through physical testing and FEA.

My work sat across the design, manufacturing and analysis of the project. I helped develop the joint designs, produced the test specimens, set up and analysed simulations in ANSYS, and carried out tensile and three-point bending tests to see how the real parts compared with our predictions. One of the more interesting findings was that the Domino 0° joint gave the best overall strength and stiffness, while the spiral joint behaved much more flexibly than the conventional designs — and ultimately failed earlier in testing than the FEA predicted.

The project was a good introduction to the messy gap between a model and a physical object. Anisotropy, layer adhesion, manufacturing tolerances and the actual behaviour of the material all started to matter once we took the parts out of ANSYS and put them in the test machine.

The full report is available here.