Automated fiber placement (AFP) is an additive manufacturing modality. It is a robotic manufacturing technology to manufacture CFRP laminates by using slit tapes of pre-preg material. AFP is suitable for manufacturing large structural parts (wing skin panels, ribs, fuselage sections etc.) that can have curvatures. The advent of AFP technology has revolutionized composite manufacturing by improving production rate, decreasing the cost and scrap. One other notable advantage of AFP is that the designer is no more restricted to use straight fiber paths, which means it is possible to have fiber paths designed for optimizing structural performance. The scope of this work is to identify the manufacturing parameters and associated constraints imposed by these parameters on the manufacturability of steered fiber structural panels, using currently available AFP machines and to incorporate these constraints into deriving optimal paths to maximize the buckling load. A square laminated plate under compressive in-plane loads is used to illustrate the results.
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