In-situ Automated Fiber Placement System for Manufacturing of Aerospace-grade Thermoplastic Composites – Elastic Consolidation Roller

In-situ Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) is an additive manufacturing process for the automated processing of carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastics without the use of an autoclave to produce large-area structures with fiber alignments appropriate to the load path. The productivity of the process is limited by the time-consuming consolidation process required to achieve sufficient laminate quality. In this paper, a manufacturing system is presented that aims to increase the productivity of the in-situ process by combining a vibration-excited consolidation roller with an individually controllable VCSEL laser. For the dynamic excitation by a piezoelectric actuator integrated into the roller, the silicone roller known from the state of the art for the laser-based AFP process shall be replaced by a thinner and stiffer coating. The aim of the investigations carried out in this study is therefore to gain basic findings on the stiffness, the contact length and the resulting consolidation time of consolidation rollers with thin elastomer coatings. The results show that, thin and soft coatings (A40) have a consolidation time of up to 0.26 s, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art, while the consolidation time of hard coatings (A60, A80) is limited to 0.06 s and thus shorter than for rollers known from the state of the art, which consist entirely of silicone.