Modelling the effect of process conditions on steering-induced defects in automated fibre placement (AFP)

Automated manufacturing of carbon fibre-reinforced polymer composites, such as automated fibre placement (AFP), is widely used in the aerospace industry. Due to the large number of physical and environmental phenomena involved and their (mathematical) nonlinearity, simulating the AFP process under varied processing conditions has, for a long time, been computationally out of reach. This paper discusses how recent advancements in the Finite Element (FE) simulation of steering-induced defects in AFP can allow virtual optimisation of the process prior to physical trials. First, efforts necessary to adequately characterise the material experimentally and constitutive models able to represent the observed behaviour are reviewed. The material models are then incorporated into a simulation platform developed in a commercial FE package. It is shown that the proposed virtual AFP platform has good predictive capabilities against experimental data available from literature. Its potential to capture the influence of processing conditions on layup quality is investigated.