Automated dry fiber placement: A growing trend

Among the many collaboratives and individual companies that have pursued or are currently pursuing initiatives in dry fiber placement and OOA process development are the following:

• AUTOW project (2007-2009) led by National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and including Dassault (Paris, France) and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI, Tel Aviv, Israel).
• Cytec PRISM develops TX1100 dry tape for resin infusion preforms via AFP.
• Ingersoll Machine Tools (Rockford, IL, US) and University of South Carolina McNair Center (Columbia, SC, US) collaborate with Hexcel HiTape for aerospace production using dry fiber AFP.
• DYNAFIB project for local reinforcements in anti-vibration automotive systems using injection molding — Coriolis Composites (Queven, France), Cooper Standard.
• FIABILIN project for bio-matrix infused flax structures — Coriolis, Arkema (Colombes, France).
• German Aerospace Center (DLR) Center for Lightweight-Production-Technology  (Stade, Germany) — full-scale WingCover DFP for resin infusion.
• MG Aerospace (Augsburg, Germany) Fiber-reinforced Optimized Rocket Case (FORC), a solid rocket motor case, using dry fiber and resin infusion.
• The D3D dry fiber preform manufacturing method for automated aerospace production, from Composite Alliance Corp. (Dallas, TX, US), developed originally by Shikibo Ltd. (Osaka, Japan).
• Infusion Resins for Automated Dry Fiber Placement — NASA SBIR via Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, AL, US).

This short article is a Side Story to an R&D Progress Report titled "Dry fiber placement: Surpassing limits," for CW's Out of Autoclave Supplment to its CW February 2016 issue.