Filament winding pattern design for diameter-varying tube

Abstract

The traditionally diameter-varying tube is a combination part of cylinder and cone with unsmooth transition region, which is usually a weak link. Using spline technique, we present a smooth diameter-varying tube consisting of cylinder and revolution surface with interpolation spline as meridian, and study the stability of three categories of typical curves used for filament winding, geodesics, semi-geodesics, and constant winding angle curve. A sufficient condition that makes fiber path non-bridging is introduced by analyzing normal curvature, and furthermore there is a sufficient and necessary condition of non-bridging geodesics. For constant angle winding, an efficient algorithm for determining whether constant winding angle curve is stable or not is presented by investigating its slippage coefficient , and a novel winding pattern design metthod is proposed for filament winding diameter-varying tube. These methods have been applied to our computer aided filament winding software. The experimental and simulation results show that our method can design winding pattern of uniformly covering the mandrel, and efficiently shortens the design time.