Leveraging Automated Fiber Placement Computer Aided Process Planning Framework for Defect Validation and Dynamic Layup Strategies

Process planning represents an essential stage of the Automated Fiber Placement
(AFP) workflow. It develops useful and efficient machine processes based upon the
working material, composite design, and manufacturing resources. The current state
of process planning requires a high degree of interaction from the process planner
and could greatly benefit from increased automation. Therefore, a list of key steps
and functions are created to identify the more difficult and time-consuming phases of
process planning. Additionally, a set of metrics must exist by which to evaluate the
effectiveness of the manufactured laminate from the machine code created during the Process Planning stage.
Layup strategies, in addition to dog ears, stagger shifts, steering constraints, and
starting points, represented the group of functions labeled as process optimization
and ranked the highest in terms of priority for automation. The laminates resulting
from the selected parameters are evaluated through the occurrences of principal defect metrics such as fiber gaps, overlaps, angle deviation and steering violations.
This document presents an automated software solution to the layup strategy
and starting point selection phase of process planning. A series of ply scenarios are
generated with variations of these ply parameters and evaluated according to a set of
metrics entered by the Process Planner. These metrics are generated through use of
the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), where relative importance between each of
the fiber features are defined. The ply scenarios are selected which reduce the overall
fiber feature scores based on the defects the Process Planner wishes to minimize.