Investigation about the Manufacturing Technique of the Composite Corner Fitting Part

Abstract

Textile composite reinforcement forming has been employed in many aeronautic industries as a traditional composite manufacturing process. The double-curved shape manufacturing may be difficult and can lead to defects when the composite parts have high curvatures and large deformations. Compared with the textile composites forming, surface 3D weaving can demonstrate directly the geometry of final composite part without the stages involved in 2D product. The weaving in three directions is completely designed and warp and weft yarns are always perpendicular to the surfaces of the final 3D ply. These two manufacturing techniques are applied to produce an important piece of aircraft: the corner fitting. The 3D weaving results are compared with the experimental forming by a punch as same geometry as the corner fitting part. The conveniences and limits of each technique are investigated. The comparisons show particularly a perfect final 3D fabric with homogeneous fibre volume fraction performed by the surface 3D weaving technique.

Towards the deformability of triaxial braided composite reinforcement during manufacturing

“…Preforming defects can be experienced during the composites manufacturing. Wrinkling is one of the most common preforming defects at macroscale considering the effects on in-plane shearing and bending [23,24,40]. The methods such as finite element and experimental analysis were utilized to find out the correlation between the processing parameters like blank-holder pressure and wrinkle [6,23,24] and finally to optimise the preforming stage [25][26][27].…”

“…Although the deformability behaviours during the preforming have been widely recognized and investigated in many perspectives, the previous researches mainly focused on the woven 4 or NCF (Non-crimp-Fabrics) fabrics with different punch shapes such as hemisphere [32][33][34], double-dome [27,35,36], eccentric cone [37], tetrahedral and square box [38][39][40][41][42]. On the contrary, even though Jacquot et al [43] compared the deformability behaviours of woven and biaxial braided fabrics manufactured from the same comingled flax/PA12 yarns on the hemispherical punch, there are relatively few research works dealing with the braided reinforcements preforming.…”

Analysis of the preforming behaviour of the braided and woven flax/polyamide fabrics

“…Many studies have been done not only on the carbon and glass fibres reinforced textile composite preforming on hemispherical shape [36][37][38] for woven fabric, noncrimp fabrics [39], 3D interlock [40] or weft-knitted fabric [36], but also on doubledome shape [41][42][43], eccentric cone [44], tetrahedral shape [45][46][47] and square box [48,49]. On the contrary, few research work has dealt with the natural fibre reinforced textile forming [33,35] and none concerns the braided fabrics forming.…”