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Meeting the volumes, cost and technical challenges for further penetration of

composites in airframes

Prof. Prasad Potluri EPSRC High Value Manufacturing Catapult Fellow

Professor of Robotics and Textile Composites Director of Research, Northwest Composites Centre

University of Manchester

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Outline

Recently developed composite airframes have over 50% by volume of composites mainly representing thin shell structures in fuselage and wings. These structures are fibre-placed with ATL/AFP machines and cured in autoclaves. Further penetration of composites to replaces relatively thick parts with complex geometry requires innovative manufacturing, analysis/design and testing/certification methods. These composites need to exhibit a degree of plasticity on impact and avoid brittle failure. Automated dry fibre placement, 3D weaving and braiding technologies are explored in this talk.

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Composites in a modern civil airframe A350XWB

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Hand Layup

Source: Composites World

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Automated Fibre placement (AFP/ATL)

Source: mtorres

The EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Composites

EPSRC funded centre: £10 million University of Nottingham University of Manchester University of Bristol Cranfield University National Composites Centre Aerospace: Airbus, GKN, Rolls-Royce Automotive: Bentley, Caparo, Lotus Energy: Luxfer, Vestas Sigmatex, Herzog

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Fibre Placement a key link between carbon fibre production and manufacturing

composite structures

• Placing carbon fibres, continuous or discontinuous, with or without the resin, in preferred orientations and with specified placement accuracy (±σ) and throughput (kg/hr).

• Hand lay-up of prepregs and dry fabrics: suffers from accuracy and repeatability; limited throughput (<1kg/hr); prone to manufacturing defects such as wrinkles, overlaps etc; expensive.

• ATL, AFP Technologies: primarily prepreg material lay-up in conjunction with Autoclaves. Limited development with dry fibre tapes stabilised by nonwoven veils.

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Dry Fibre Placement

Textile Technologies such as weaving and multi-axial stitch bonding are the primary manufacturing platforms for 2D broadcloth;

automated cutting with ply cutters;

robotic pick and place – some progress

Draping – still done manually, not much progress in automated draping.

Dry fibre placement for placing fibres into near-net three dimensional shapes

• 3D Weaving of near-net shapes

• Braiding: stretching beyond making a sock

• Complex winding

• Robotic tow placement and tufting

Case for near-net 3D preforming

• Reduced assembly and post-processing costs

• Reduced fibre wastage

• Improved damage tolerance with through-thickness reinforcement

• Shifting a number of processing steps to lower-end of the composites supply chain

• In recent years, 3D weaving received a lot of attention due to a number of high-profile applications. However, 3D weaving based on conventional Jacquard loom technology has number of limitations.

• Near-net preforming of complex geometries can only be achieved with a combination of textile technologies including 3D weaving, fibre placement, braiding, stitching/tufting , as well as high-speed discontinuous fibre preforming technology.

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3D Weaving

3D Weaving on a 4 x 4 shuttle loom (1990s)

Carbon fibre weaving on a rapier loom (2014)

Multi-insertion 3D weaving (2015)

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3D weaving

3D woven seat frame

3Dwoven fan blade exhibited at JEC

3D woven preform for nacelle structure: INTERTEX/Sigmatex

Radial Braiding

Cruciform with metal insert

Braiding complex shapes

Automotive cantrail

complex multi-axial winding

Robotic 3D Fibre Placement

Automated dry fibre lay-up

Bias fibre placement

Tufting to join bias tows with 3D fabric

High speed robot for fibre and patch placement

Non-crimp biaxial, tufted

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Compression Moulding of Multi-Architecture Composites (CMMC)

DCFP + Textile preform

Led by Prof Nick Warrior at Nottingham

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Resin Infusion of aircraft parts

Source: Drycomposites.com

Pressure bulkhead, cargo door

C-series wing

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Discussion

• Dry fibre preforming sits neatly between AFP/ATL processes and discontinuous preformng processes (F3P, DCFP)

• Judicious combination of 3D preforms and discontinuous preforms processed by compression moulding…