Integrated manufacturing of REciclable multi-material COmposites for the TRANSport sector
Automated fibre placement path generation for complex surfaces via digital image deconvolution algorithm
Automated fibre placement (AFP) potentiates the fabrication of fibre-reinforced composite with high efficiency and quality. Complex surface design on aircraft components leads to irregular reference directions for tow layup. Path aligned with such direction would inevitably generate excessive gap/overlaps over the ply to cause quality degradation, and vice versa. Existing methods mostly generate tow paths via geometric offset from an initial guide curve, making it hard to compromise the contradiction. This paper resolves this trade-off issue by developing a digital image deconvolution algorithm. The problem is formulated as a linear partial differential equation and rasterized into digital image domain to be solved by proposed image deconvolution algorithm, which is proved to be computationally efficient and accurate. Compared with exiting path planning strategy, the proposed method finds global optimal tow paths achieve enhanced fibre alignment and acceptable ply thickness variation, providing new paradigm for AFP path planning on complex surface laminates.
» Author: Ke Xu, Xiaozhong Hao, Jingming Lin
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 768737
