Abstract
We developed a portable carbon fiber/epoxy printer that can be used to repair damaged carbon fiber reinforcement plastics (CFRPs). Conventionally, CFRP repair features grinding/excision of the damaged area, attachment of a prefabricated CFRP patch, and curing. The repair patch must match the ground/cut area, and is usually laid-up by hand. Our device prints epoxy-bound carbon fibers directly onto the ground/cut surface. We designed and fabricated a prototype printer and tested its repair capacity. We fabricated and compared simple samples with varying tensile strengths. We compared printer-repaired and hand-laid-up samples; the former samples exhibited higher stiffness. We used simple image processing to verify the differences between the samples.
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