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Fast and Simple Interacting Models of Drape Tool and Ply Material for Handling Free Hanging, Pre-impregnated Carbon Fibre Material

2019; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-030-31993-9_1

1876-1119

Gudmundur G. Gunnarsson, Ole Wennerberg Nielsen, Christian Schlette, Henrik Gordon Petersen,

Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies

Robotic layup of pre-impregnated (prepreg) fiber plies onto complex molds is a hitherto unsolved problem. At the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), we have gathered an international consortium with industrial keyplayers for addressing this gap in the FlexDraper project. We use an underactuated array of suction cups to handle the plies and our approach is based on model- and simulation-based control of the shaping of the tool and the free hanging plies during the draping procedure. This requires fast computable models in the draping control loop. In this paper, we present a tool model that predicts the 6D configuration of the suction cups based on the actuator positions and subsequently a ply model that predicts the shape of the free hanging prepreg fiber plies with perpendicular fiber directions, where the ply is held (clamped) at a set of locations that are not too far apart. Rather than using computationally expensive physical techniques, e.g. FEM simulations, our ply model is only based on interpolations between the held locations satisfying curve length constraints in fiber directions. The paper also contains experimental tests for the accuracy of the overall model.