CompositesWorld
Issue link: https://cw.epubxp.com/i/546021
AUGUST 2015 6 CompositesWorld PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE » My aerospace career spans 41 years, and manufacturing equipment has been its primary focus. I worked my way through college in an aircraft machine shop, where I operated a variety of metal processing equipment. When I got involved with aerospace composites in 1984, my experience with processing equipment continued, and my entire 31-year career in composites has been focused on automated lamination processes. When I started in composites, I was fortunate to work for the company that did a lot AFP/ATL evolution: Dual-process workcells Mtorres dual-process workcell MTorres ofers its small dual-process workcell with two delivery head options, an 8-tow head and a 16-tow head. Heads can be confgured to run slit tape widths of 6.35 mm or 12.70 mm. MTorres uses a KUKA Robotics (Shelby Township, MI, US) KR1000 Titan Robot for its dual-process workcell. Typical x-axis travel is approxi- mately 9.14m. The workcell's installation footprint is about 13.7m by 7.6m. of the original development work on an automated lamination process known as automated fber placement (AFP). I've watched AFP mature over the years and become the premier process for fabrication of composite aircraft primary structure, including fuselage structure on both the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350. In the early days, AFP and automated tape layer (ATL) machines evolved to be quite large because they were developed typically for large aircraft structures (e.g., large skin panels). By contrast, the metals world in which I started my career had a wide variety of equipment sizes and confgurations, and I often wondered when automated lamination technology for composites would mature to the point that a greater variety of machines would be ofered to a wider range — and greater number — of potential customers. Te market for large ATL and AFP equipment has been driven, typically, by new aircraft programs (commercial and military) that have emerged every few years with expanded use of composite materials. But in the past few years, no new composites-intensive aircraft programs have appeared on the horizon. When Airbus and Boeing elected to re-engine their current A320 and 737 commer- cial aircraft instead of developing all-new, composites-intensive models (with composite content similar to the A350 and 787), the market for large ATL and AFP equipment was no longer as strong as it had been in previous years. Tis market reality has been a factor in machine suppliers' development of more variety in composites lamination equipment. During the past few years, we have begun to see an expanding variety of composites lamination equipment, and I have noticed something that I feel will be the "next big thing" in automated lamination. Several machine suppliers are ofering equipment that is based on commercially available robots. Although this is not exactly new technology and has been ofered for a few years by some of the smaller companies that ofer composites equipment, such as Automated Dynamics (Schenectady, NY, US) and Coriolis Composites (Queven, France), the technology also has begun to catch on with some of the major composites machine suppliers. Te most interesting examples I've seen are the small "dual- process workcells." As the name implies, they have the capability to perform both AFP and ATL — one machine, two lamination processes. Tese have been developed by at least two of the major players, MTorres (Pamplona, Spain) and Electroimpact (Mukilteo, WA, US). Small, here, is a relative term. As the image captions at left indicate, the workcells are sizable, but they are much more compact than the AFP/ATL systems used to make aircraft primary structures, and they can be installed in most existing factories without major facility modifcations prior to installation. Dual-process workcells consist of a robot-based lamina- tion machine that moves on x-axis rails/drives parallel to and between a layup table and a headstock/tailstock tool station. Te layup table is primarily used for laying fat laminates, which are Electroimpact's dual-process workcell Electroimpact's system has a typical x-axis travel of ~12.2m, depending on the cus- tomer's size requirements. Installation footprint for this machine is about 18.3m by 12.2m. The workcell has AFP delivery head options of 8 or 16 tows and tow widths of 3.18 mm, 6.35 mm or 12.70 mm, and it also has a small ATL head option that will lay 76.2-mm, 152.4-mm, or 304.8-mm wide tape. All power and pneumatics are passed through a commercially available robotic toolchanger assembly. It also has integrated systems for laser projection, automated ply boundary inspection and automated lap/gap inspection.