Fiber-Patch Placement: Automating Composite Lay-Up for Aerospace’s Complex Geometries
Aerospace and defense industries are increasingly reliant on lightweight, high-strength composite components, driving demand for advanced manufacturing technologies. Fiber-patch placement (FPP) is emerging as a key solution, overcoming the limitations of conventional automated fiber placement (AFP) by utilizing discrete fiber patches tailored to complex 3D shapes.
Bridging the Automation gap
FPP represents an additive lay-up process designed for the automated production of high-performance fiber materials – including prepregs, adhesive films, and dry fibers – on challenging geometries.Unlike AFP’s continuous tow deposition, FPP employs individually placed patches, offering greater flexibility. According to industry sources, this approach expands design freedom for engineers and enables deployment in areas where AFP falls short.
geometric Versatility Demonstrated
To illustrate FPP’s capabilities, a lay-up demonstrator was developed to address a common aerospace manufacturing challenge: placing fiber material over steep 80° chamfers, frequently found in composite sandwich structures used in fuselage components, storage tanks, and engine nacelles. Traditional AFP struggles with such features due to rigid contact surfaces and limited compaction, often resulting in material slippage. Even manual lay-up of these complex shapes demands significant skill and effort to achieve acceptable quality.
Beyond AFP: Mechanical Compliance and Clever Control
Overcoming these geometric barriers requires both mechanical compliance and intelligent motion control. Cevotec Samba Pro lay-up systems integrate two key features to achieve this: post-placement push-in and rolling motion.
Post-placement push-in utilizes the gripper’s form-adaptive foam core to compact fiber material into concave or angular features after patch deposition, ensuring full surface contact and mitigating air enclosures. Rolling motion, employed on surfaces with strong curvatures, involves progressively draping the patch across the surface, enhancing conformity and eliminating wrinkles.
Form-Adaptive Precision: The Cevotec Gripper
The demonstrator was produced using a new-generation placement gripper from Cevotec GmbH, featuring a form-adaptive foam core with integrated vacuum channels for secure patch handling and conformal lay-up. The gripper boasts multizone suction, sensor-based patch detection, and customizable surface options. Key specifications include patch sizes ranging from 25 × 70 mm to 75 × 290 mm, a 100 mm foam core height, and a rapid-connect system for robotic arm integration. These grippers can directly place materials onto honeycomb or foam-core structures, allowing for individually defined overlaps or gaps per layer.
The demonstrator utilized a UD carbon fiber prepreg (150 gsm) with 50 mm width and 250 mm length, following a lay-up sequence of [0°, -45°, +45°]. Tooling consisted of a 3D-printed mold (500 mm x 200 mm), and the process was managed using Cevotec Samba Pro PV and LabArtist Studio software for CAD/CAM. This configuration also enables the placement of auxiliary materials like adhesive films and glass-fiber veils with 100% surface coverage in a single layer.
Process Strategies for Sandwich Structures
FPP technology supports multiple strategies for sandwich structure production: outer skin lay-up and core bonding, direct-core lay-up, and a hybrid approach.Outer skin lay-up decouples skin quality from core constraints, while direct-core lay-up simplifies the process and reduces handling time. The hybrid approach offers engineers flexibility in balancing performance and cost. Advancement efforts are underway to automate honeycomb core placement, aiming for full automation of high-performance sandwich component lay-up.
FPP’s Role in Aerospace Composite Manufacturing
FPP is positioned to fill the automation gap between AFP and manual lay-up in aerospace applications, offering precise, efficient, and accurate fiber material placement on complex geometries.The resulting laminates exhibit consistent compaction and optimized fiber orientation, crucial for structural integrity.
Specifically, FPP excels in two key areas: conformable placement in geometrically complex areas and accommodating nonstandard laminate requirements, such as defined overlaps for auxiliary materials. Features like post-placement push-in and rolling motion are instrumental in achieving these results.
Manufacturers can leverage FPP to automate legacy component production, meeting future cost and rate demands, and for new part developments, fully utilizing the technology’s potential from the outset.
