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Charles L. Tucker, III

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Alexander Rankin Professor and Associate Dean

Professor

Contact Information

• Office: 346 Mechanical Engineering Building
• Mailing Address:
  

  346 Mechanical Engineering Building
  1206 West Green Street
  Urbana, IL 61801

• Phone Number: 217-333-2692
• Fax Number: 217-244-6534
• Email Address: ctucker AT illinois.edu
• Research Website: http://polypro.me.uiuc.edu/%7Eclt3/

Research Description

Professor Tucker has had a major impact on engineering practice by developing models and methods to predict fiber orientation patterns in injection-molded composite parts. Flow during mold filling imparts a pattern of preferential orientation to these fibers, which in turn controls the mechanical properties of the molded part. Professor Tucker developed a governing equation for flow-induced fiber orientation and introduced the use of tensor moment equations to create a model that can be solved with a practical amount of computer time. The resulting model has been adopted by every commercial software program for injection molding, and is used worldwide hundreds of times each day to predict the fiber orientation pattern and mechanical properties of molded parts.

Continue reading about Prof. Tucker's research.