With the expanding use of fiber placement technology to control fiber orientations in composite parts, a need exists for an integrated system allowing concurrent design, modeling and analysis. Currently, the capability of designing fiber placed parts resides with the offline programming systems of the fiber placement machines themselves. This design capability exists independently of modeling and analysis capabilities. This paper presents the design and implementation of an integrated design and analysis system for use in preliminary through detailed design phases of a fiber placed structure. The described system is unique in that it controls the design of tows rather than plies, and as such enables an evaluation of manufacturability during preliminary design. Implementation includes the development of self-positioning tow representations, simulating the manufactured part, using specified fiber angle control methods; validation of these representations; integration of self-positioning tow representations with a pre-existing analysis tool; and integration with finite element analysis tools accepting the NASTRAN file format. This system allows for the generation and evaluation of multiple solutions in the preliminary design phase without the use of proprietary machine programming systems.
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Schueler et al. (2002) studied this question.