Abstract
The importance of advanced composites in industries such as aerospace, defense, automotive, clean energy, and hydrogen has grown at a fast pace and is expected to keep enlarging its strategic importance. Using objective patent-based methodologies, this paper estimates the yearly performance improvement rates and traces the most recent technological trajectories of Automated Tape Laying (ATL), Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) and Additive Manufacturing (AM) for advanced composites. For each technology, a set of representative patents is retrieved. A robust predictor based on the centrality of patents within the citation network is used to estimate yearly performance improvement rates. A knowledge persistence algorithm is applied to trace the most important technological trajectories. Results show that ATL (13.0%) and AFP (9.3%) are improving faster than milling technology (3.4%), a high grade metal technology, which indicates that composites applications should continue to grow relative to metal based components. AM for advanced composites is improving at a substantially faster rate (31.5%) suggesting potential to penetrate further as a viable solution in the advanced manufacturing landscape. ATL and AFP trajectories show developments mainly targeted to increase process productivity and reliability. Productivity increases are fostered primarily by innovations in automatic inspection, tow/tape heating, and material dispensing. Improvements over tow/tape cutting and steering systems and closed-loop control of operations contribute to reliability increase. AM appears to be evolving from cartesian motion to robotic arms machines. These allow for deposition over three dimensional paths which greatly increase component design freedom and mechanical properties further fostering AM's penetration.
Published Version
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