Design of Small-Scale Filament Winding & Placement Machine

Filament winding and automated fiber placement have been recognized as two effective techniques to produce continuous fiber composite products with superior properties. In this paper, a kind of small-scale automated filament winding and placement machine is developed which combines the advantages of both filament winding and automated fiber placement. It realizes the winding function of conventional four-axis filament winding machine as well as simple concave fiber placement function by adding a compacting roller. For ensuring the quality of the product, the forming process parameters such as tension and compacting force are regulated and controlled by the specially designed mechanism as well as the self-adjusting fuzzy PID control algorithm. The winding trajectory is obtained by geodesic winding. And a simulation carried out in Adams shows that this machine can realize simple fiber placement with satisfactory compacting force. This machine can be applied for producing the small complex composite component in laboratory conveniently.