| Abstract Scope |
Advanced composite structures made using curved fiber path laminates allow to generate nonuniform in-plane structural stiffness, which can tailor the inplane stress distribution under external load in a favorable way. The critical stress location can be shifted away from the weakest and imperfection regions for an imperfection-insensitive structure design. Furthermore, the tow-steered laminates enable to improve the buckling response. Robotic arm-assisted Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) has been used for composite structure manufacturing. AFP enables prepreg tows placed with high accuracy of fiber orientation, higher rate, and improved material utilization, thereby reducing manual layup errors, labor costs, and waste of raw materials. However, during the tape slit deposition, there is a unique prepreg tape out-of-plane wrinkle defect associated with the deposited prepreg tape compared to the conventional straight fiber path laminates. This defect is caused by the curvature-induced compression in the inner region of the deposited tape. This study will extend previous study towards [1] understanding the wrinkle formation of deposited tape with constant and various curvatures. Preliminary study [2] shows a similar wrinkle mode observed between the numerical prediction and the experimental studies. The effect of the prepreg tack on the tape wrinkle will be studied and discussed.
1. W. Zhao and R. K. Kapania, "Buckling Analysis and Optimization of Stiffened Varying-Angle-Tow Laminates with Manufacturing Constraints," American Society for Composites 34th Technical Conference, 2019.
2. W. Zhao, "Advanced Tow-steered Composite Laminates and Manufacturing through Collaborative‐Robotic Automated Fiber Placement," 5th International Mechatronics Conference, 2023. |