Technologies

Dry Fibre Placement

The ADVITAC consortium has brought together a group of fibre placement specialists who will address current problems associated with this technology and investigate the state of the art in fibre placement.

The automated fibre placement technique is a robotic technique, which is used to place narrow strips of tacky thermoset or thermoplastic prepreg material onto a mould to form a laminate, which is then cured in the autoclave. Although the narrowness of the material strips offers more flexibility in terms of part geometry than hand lay-up of plies, components made with these fibre placement techniques for pre-impregnated materials have limited options with respect to the fibre trajectories that can be followed by the machine, and limited possibilities for part integration, due to the complicated processing conditions mentioned above.

Within the scope of a previous EC project (FP6 “AUTOW”) a new capability has been developed, which combines the advantages of the fibre-preform/LCM technology to form highly complicated and integrated parts, with the versatility of an automated fibre placement machine to make the necessary complex preforms in an automated way. During the AUTOW project, tows have been produced that are rigid and slick, so they can be fed through the deposition head, and made tacky “on command” when placed onto the mould, so they will stick to it, or to other tows already placed. For this, the tow has been provided with a binder (or another medium). The binder, when heated, becomes tacky, and cures after cooling down.

This technique will be used by the partners of the ADVITAC project to develop the automated dry fibre placement process as follows:

• Use of a standard automotive robot for Fibre Placement as a low cost system.
• Improvement of the combination of Automated Dry Fibre Placement and Liquid Composite Moulding.
• Broadening the knowledge of dry fibre placement and the injection of performs
• Enhancement of the current dry fibre placement capabilities using:
  • Optical fibre sensors for structural health monitoring
  • Metal fibres or strips for lightning strike protection (electrical continuity)
  • Soluble fibres for increased toughness/damage tolerance