Infrared Heating Technology for Automated Fiber Placement

Prepreg stickiness is the adhesion between prepregs or between a prepreg and a mold in lapup process. It is critical for automated fiber placement, because the stickiness should be small for smooth transport, as well as large enough on the laying surface for a good placement performance. To ensure prepreg stickiness always being in the optimum laying window, placement temperature should be changed according to the laying speed. In our work, the relationship between laying speed and emissive power of heating lamp was studied. The heat transfer process between heating lamp and laying surface was analyzed and the control equation of dynamic temperature was derived. Finally, the infrared heating system was built and its effectiveness was verified based on placement experiment.