Abstract
In recent years, the concepts of industry 4.0 are widely spreading in many different sectors, from agriculture to home automation, from transportation systems to manufacturing processes. One of the pillars of this concept is related to the use of robotic cells. The focus of the present work is the robotic automated layup of dry fibrous preforms to be employed in liquid composite molding (LCM) processes. In particular, the article describes a software tool developed to simulate the automated placement and layup of fiber fabrics and tissues on complex shape molds by means of a robotic system. The tool has been coded in Matlab language. An end-effector has been appositely designed for the fiber layup and it has been included in the model. The simulation provides as output the path generation and the configuration of the robotic arm and of end effector along the entire layup process. The implemented code has been compared with the commercial software RoboDK.
Highlights
Advantages properties of fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs) have promoted their wide usage in several applicative sectors, ranging from aerospace, automotive, through to naval and construction industries [1,2,3]
The present study aims to the implementation of a computational protocol and tools for composite manufacturing by automate layup process
To make the robotic layup performed during this study as close as possible to the hand layup performed by the laminator, a specific end-effector has been carried out composed by three terminals: a cylindric wheel for a flat or oblique plane, a filleted wheel for fillets and narrow parts, and a small punch for the angles and vertexes (Figure 5)
Summary
Advantages properties of fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs) have promoted their wide usage in several applicative sectors, ranging from aerospace, automotive, through to naval and construction industries [1,2,3]. Advanced FRPs are multi-phase materials made of continuous reinforcing fibers, oriented in one or more specific direction, embedded within a polymeric matrix. The increasing request from industry of lightweight multi-materials components, pushed the scientific community to devote remarkable efforts towards the manufacturing, modeling, and processing of high-quality fiber reinforced composites [4,5,6,7,8,9]. One of the main drawback in FRPs is related with the poor surface properties. As a multi-phase material, FRPs have an anisotropic behavior dependent on reinforcements’ orientation. This leads to excellent performance under longitudinal loading, but scarce (matrix dependent) behavior in case of transverse loading. To improve the material properties and reduce anisotropic behavior, the most used strategy is to lay the fibers plies in different directions
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