Abstract:
The Automated Fiber Placement process (AFP) has been developed to allow manufacturing of complex shape structural composite parts. Carbon fiber reinforced polymeric tapes are placed on a mould surface to create each ply for constituting a laminated part. Nowadays, the leading aerospace industry employs the AFP process to manufacture complex parts, such as double curvature panels. In order to archive high process repeatability, numerical control (NC) machines or robotic platforms are used, and their machine code must be automatically generated due to its programming complexity. Although there are commercial software to accomplish this task, it is necessary to exhaustively execute manufacturing simulations to determine if the machine is capable to manufacture a given part. In this work, constructive issues of a specific AFP machine are studied, in order to build a basic for the development of analysis tools to verify the manufacturability of a given part. The manufacturing simulation of a part with simple geometry (flat panel) illustrates the analysis results and shows that the verification of the machine capacity to manufacture a part is not a trivial task, because the condition of the mould to be inside the machine’s workspace does not ensure the part manufacturability. This occurs because the compaction force must be normal to the mould surface.
Reference:
ALMEIDA, Rynaldo Zanotele Hemerly de; MELLO, Wellington Lombardo Nunes de; BOTTENE, Alex Camilli . Modelagem cinemática e análise dos limites geométricos de máquina de deposição automática de fibras. In: CONGRESSO BRASILEIRO DE ENGENHARIA DE FABRICAÇÃO, 7., 2013, Penedo, Itatiaia, RJ. Anais… 11 p.
The Automated Fiber Placement process (AFP) has been developed to allow manufacturing of complex shape structural composite parts. Carbon fiber reinforced polymeric tapes are placed on a mould surface to create each ply for constituting a laminated part. Nowadays, the leading aerospace industry employs the AFP process to manufacture complex parts, such as double curvature panels. In order to archive high process repeatability, numerical control (NC) machines or robotic platforms are used, and their machine code must be automatically generated due to its programming complexity. Although there are commercial software to accomplish this task, it is necessary to exhaustively execute manufacturing simulations to determine if the machine is capable to manufacture a given part. In this work, constructive issues of a specific AFP machine are studied, in order to build a basic for the development of analysis tools to verify the manufacturability of a given part. The manufacturing simulation of a part with simple geometry (flat panel) illustrates the analysis results and shows that the verification of the machine capacity to manufacture a part is not a trivial task, because the condition of the mould to be inside the machine’s workspace does not ensure the part manufacturability. This occurs because the compaction force must be normal to the mould surface.
Reference:
ALMEIDA, Rynaldo Zanotele Hemerly de; MELLO, Wellington Lombardo Nunes de; BOTTENE, Alex Camilli . Modelagem cinemática e análise dos limites geométricos de máquina de deposição automática de fibras. In: CONGRESSO BRASILEIRO DE ENGENHARIA DE FABRICAÇÃO, 7., 2013, Penedo, Itatiaia, RJ. Anais… 11 p.
