Inline Quality Control for Thermoplastic Automated Fibre Placement

Abstract

Aerospace production is relying heavily on quality assurance, especially for lightweight materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs). Due to the sequential organization of manufacturing and quality assurance lead times for parts and machine downtime are increased. An example is the highly automated process of thermoset tape laying, where every ply is manually inspected. Customized solutions to integrate quality assurance do exist, however mainly for specific processes and hardware. This leads to costly, isolated and non-transferable systems. At the Center of Lightweight Production Technology in Augsburg, Germany a more versatile and modular concept for inline data acquisition, storage and evaluation is investigated. On the basis of a laser line and camera system a generic inline measurement system for automated fiber placement (AFP) is developed, that is capable to inspect a variety of quality aspects such as positional tolerances and material properties. In a database driven approach the collected data is stored and analyzed. This paper presents the generic inline measurement system, the data storage system and the obtained measurement results for a thermoplastic AFP process. Additionally suggestions for future improvements and possible applications are described.