Research On CAD Of Automatic Composite Fiber Placement

Automatic Fiber Placement (FP) is a new manufacture technique to produce affordable composite materials. It can apply to composite structure with low manufacture cost, high efficiency and good quality. FP has been widely applied in aerospace and aviation industry to produce complicated shaped components in North America and Europe. In China, FP study is just beginning now.The Fiber Placement CAD is one of the key fundamental technologies in FP. Fiber placement path generation, tows number calculation and fiber placement information acquisition of Fiber Placement CAD are investigated deeply in this paper. The main contents are listed as follows:(1) Fiber placement path planning is researched and a fiber placement path generation algorithm is designed to meet the requirement for arbitrary placement angles. Firstly, fiber placement reference is introduced to define the placement angle. Based on that, a series of points on fiber placement path are generated. Finally, the fiber placement path is formed with these dispersed points. The exact process of 0,±45 and 90 degree fiber placement path generation is showed in this paper.(2) An algorithm of tows number calculation is proposed. According to the distance between the points on the path and the nearby fiber placement path, the tows number is calculated on each point. With the tows number, the right width fiber band without overlapping will be placed.(3) Approaches of fiber placement information acquisition are studied. Firstly, disperses fiber placement path. Secondly, finds the control point which is nearest to the dispersed point on the fiber placement surface. Finally, acquires the fiber placement information of each control point. During the calculating process of the vertical vector, surrounding box of the surface is used to find the face segment containing the control point. Besides, a method to define the vertical vector orientation is given.(4) Based on CAA, the redeveloping platform of CATIA, a Fiber Placement CAD software prototype is implemented.