The Clemson Composites Center (CCC) recently commissioned its newest lab space at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR, Greenville, S.C., U.S.), featuring an AddComposites (Espoo, Finland) AFP-X cell with a four-tow automated fiber placement (AFP) head, representing CCC’s significant investment in advanced composites manufacturing and research.
Housed in a climate-controlled lab space, the AFP system is manipulated using a KUKA (Augsburg, Germany) industrial six-axis robot and can lay ¼-inch slit tape composite material across complex geometries with high accuracy.
The new AFP capability will support collaborative projects with industrial and academic partners in the realms of process optimization, automated inspection and smart manufacturing, aiming to close the gaps between the design, process planning, manufacturing and inspection stages of AFP.
A sizable portion of the research team’s focus is on smart manufacturing, specifically digital twinning. The system is designed to facilitate this aspect of the research by supporting seamless integration with open source and commercial tools for data collection and analysis.
Beyond research, the CCC says the equipment will serve as a platform for workforce development by giving students opportunities to work with its industrial partners, as well as practical experience with industrial scale automation equipment commonly used across high-performance manufacturing sectors.
“We want to solve the grand challenges of AFP that our team has defined, and this setup helps us achieve exactly that in the years to come,” notes Ramy Harik, director of the CCC. “We’re proud to be pushing the domain of AFP forward and graduating the future workforce talent that is needed.”
Source | Clemson Composites Center (CCC)
