Using tailored fibre placement technology for stress adapted design of composite structures

The tailored fibre placement technology, which has been developed at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden, is well capable for manufacturing textile preforms for composite parts with fibre layouts of arbitrary direction using standard embroidery technology. Additionally, a new design tool, advanced optimisation for principal stress, has been recently developed to improve the mechanical properties of prospective lightweight composite structures. Two optimisation strategies for composites with non-unidirectional layout were implemented. Within the tailored fibre placement process chain the advanced optimisation for principal stress tool enables the use of these optimisation strategies, and the transfer of corresponding results to the manufacturing process and to computational analysis. As an example, an unequal wide loaded tensile plate has been optimised, manufactured, experimentally tested and, finally, numerically calculated to verify its strain behaviour. A good coincidence between numerical and experimental results was found.