Tool path smoothing of a redundant machine: Application to Automated Fiber Placement

Automated Tape Laying and Fiber Placement of composite materials are the two principal automated processes used for fabrication of large composite structures in aeronautical industry. The aluminum parts produced by High Speed Machining tend to be replaced by carbon fiber composite parts realized with these processes. However, structural parts present reinforcement zones which disturb the tool path follow-up and generate an increase of the manufacturing time. Thus, this paper deals with the optimization of tool paths of a 7-axis machine tool of Fiber Placement with the objective of reducing the manufacturing time while ensuring the requested quality of the final part. In this paper, two complementary methods are detailed. The first method takes advantage of the degree of redundancy of the machine tool to decrease the kinematic loads of the control joints. The second method aims to smooth the orientation of the machine head along the tool path while ensuring quality constraints. These two methods are then applied on a test tool path and bring to a significant decrease of the manufacturing time (32.9%).

Research highlights
► This paper deals with Automated Tape Laying and Fiber Placement of composite materials.
► A tool path smoothing method based on filtering rotational axis orders is presented.
► The presented smoothing method is adapted to a machine tool with redundancy.
► A reduction of 32.9% of the manufacturing time is reached for the presented tool path.