Abstract
The manufacturing of composite structures is expensive due to high material cost and the amount of manual labor needed. Current manufacturing technologies, e.g. filament winding, braiding or fiber placement technologies are offering a possibility of automated manufacturing to lower these costs. Nevertheless, these technologies are limited when it comes to structures with complex fiber architecture and small geometries. A new approach to overcome these limitations is the fiber patch placement technology. The preform of a composite structure is built up with small and dry fiber patches in a sequential order. Fiber discontinuities are necessarily occurring between two patches and are influencing the mechanical properties. To optimize strength of the composite those discontinuities have to be distributed within the preform. With increased number of patches, the number of combinations of patch positions is increasing significantly. This paper presents a method based on an ant colony algorithm for an efficient calculation of an optimized distribution, which enables to use the potential of patched laminates.
Highlights
The main cost drivers in current manufacturing of composite materials are material cost and the amount of work due to a high amount of manual labor
Significant reduction in manufacturing cost of fiber material or impregnation resin are limited whether the manufacturing process still offer a high potential for cost reduction especially with lowering of fiber consumption or fiber waste [1]
The fiber tension leads to a bridging effect, which causes the Benjamin Fischer et al.: Method for an Automated Optimization of Fiber Patch Placement Layup Designs and complex fiber architecture) parts
Summary
The main cost drivers in current manufacturing of composite materials are material cost and the amount of work due to a high amount of manual labor. Unidirectional glass fiber tapes were used to improve notch behavior and a multi linearization method was developed to increase maximum strength of a composite Another new process in this field is called Tailored Patch Placement. In contrast to the processes, which were introduced at the beginning of this paper, no limitation in radii of curvature exists because a radius is covered by line of patches instead of a continuous fiber This is leading to very high design flexibility. Those characteristics are not relevant and are not further discussed This high placement flexibility is leading to higher design effort needed because the distribution and form of the discontinuity has the highest impact on the mechanical parameters achievable, e.g. maximum strength. The ant algorithm can produce meaningful results without this step and was chosen in this investigation to keep the amount of calculation effort as low as possible
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