27 July 2010

Software for composite fibre-placement from CGTech

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The programming of Automatic Fibre Placement (AFP) machines is critical and traditionally, the machine tool vendor has delivered AFP systems which suffer from a lack of programming expertise that a software specialist like CGTech can offer.

The aerospace industry recognised the need for a programming system from an industry-approved software provider as part of a standard suite of regularly updated and maintained software.

CGTech worked closely with the aerospace tooling and automation specialist Electroimpact for over 2 years to develop the AFP programming software called "Vericut Composite Programming and Simulation Suite".

Major aircraft manufacturers and their partners have tested this programming software over several years. The addition of a mathematically rigorous programming system has been demonstrated to eliminate end placement errors sometimes seen on machine tool manufacturer-developed programming systems.

The suite of software comprise of two main modules for programming and simulation.

VERICUT Composite Programming (VCP) reads CAD surfaces and ply boundary information and adds material to fill the plies according to user-specified manufacturing standards and requirements. Layup paths are then linked together to form specific layup sequences and output as NC programs for the automated layup machine.

VERICUT Composite Simulation (VCS) reads CAD models and NC programs, either from VCP or other composite layup path-generation applications, and simulates the sequence of NC programs on a virtual machine. Material is applied to the layup form via NC program instructions in a virtual CNC simulation environment. The simulated material applied to the form can be measured and inspected to ensure the NC program follows manufacturing standards and requirements. A report showing simulation results and statistical information can be automatically created.

Author
Michael Richards

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CGTech Ltd