Authors
Joshua Halbritter, Christopher Sacco, Alex Brasington, Max Kirkpatrick, Roudy Wehbe, Ramy Harik
Conference
CAMX – The Composites and Advanced Materials Exp.
Abstract
The utilization of advanced composites has been commonplace in the aerospace industry for many years due to their enhanced properties over generic materials. However, manufacturing of composite structures, especially large structures, continues to be challenging. A growing composite manufacturing technique for large aerospace structures is Automated Fiber Placement (AFP). Due to the increased performance and reliability of the AFP process, it has been rapidly advancing towards use on increasingly complex structures. However, these complex structures bring about their own issues, mainly the resulting unavoidable defects. These consequences can have adverse effects on the local and global laminate properties. Recent research has included predictions on the occurrence of these defects. The predictions have allowed for optimization of the process to minimize defects. Although the predictions are considered to be adequate, it is rare that they are validated with the actual manufacturing results. This paper aims to compare these predictions and simulations to real-world manufacturing results to examine their accuracy and validity leading to more integrated predictive capabilities. This is accomplished with the Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) software developed at the University of South Carolina’s McNAIR Center. The software is used to perform process planning on a doubly curved tool to create tool paths and extract the predicted defects. Inspection results of the manufactured plies are then imported for comparison between predicted and actual defects.
Keywords
Automated Fiber Placement, Process Planning, Defects, Inspection
Citation
Joshua Halbritter, Christopher Sacco, Alex Brasington, Max Kirkpatrick, Roudy Wehbe, & Ramy Harik. (October 2021). Experimental Investigation Of The Validity Of Automated Fiber Placement Defect Predictions. CAMX – The Composites and Advanced Materials Expo.
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