Paper number 801

AUTOMATED CONSOLIDATION DURING THE MANUFACTURE OF COMPOSITE MATERIAL BASED COMPONENTS ELASTIC CONSTANTS OF FIBER REINFORCED COMPOSITE PLATE

H D Do1, L Ma3, R Paton2, S John3 and I Herszberg 1

1Sir Lawrence Wackett Centre for Aerospace Design Technology, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, Victoria, 3001, Australia
2Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Composites structures Limited
506 Lorimer Street, Fishermen's Bend, Victoria, 3207, Australia
3Department of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University, Bundoora East Campus, PO Box 71, Bundoora, Victoria, 3083, Australia

Summary An automated system was developed for the design and manufacture of fibre reinforced plastic structures to substitute the high cost of labour in the current manual lay-up processes. This paper discusses the consolidation a proposed servo-controlled air-jet campaction system. The air-jet was designed and manufactured for use as a robot end-effector which provides an additional degree of freedom in the automated manufacturing of composite components made from prepreg and dry fabrics. This air-jet unit is computer controlled for precise vectorial and spatial positioning with respect to the tool used in the manufacture of a composite component. The focus of this paper is in the manual experimentation, which essentially simulates the proposed servo-controlled air-jet compaction system. The results, in terms of consolidation consistency, are presented with and without a process-aiding tangential force.
Keywords automated manufacture, fibre reinforced plastic composites, robotic end-effector, ply consolidation, control systems, spatial position.

Theme : Processing, Integrated Design and Manufacturing ; Processing

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