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Fiber placement process of thermoplastic material is an in situ consolidation process which can significantly reduce consolidation process time and save costs compared with autoclave consolidation. The heat and crystallization behaviours play very critical role in the quality control during the process. In this work, two dimensional model of finite element is presented to perform heat transfer analysis of fiber placement process. The relationship between heat distribution of lamination and process parameters, including roller velocity, main heating temperature, preheating temperature, preheating length and preheating location, is deeply investigated. The numerical results show that for certain heating temperature there is a safe roller velocity which should not be exceeded, and such parameters as main heating length, preheating length and preheating location could be optimized to obtain better quality of product.

The detection technique of component defects is currently only realized to detect offline defects and online surface defects during automated fiber placement (AFP). The characteristics of stress waves can be effectively applied to identify and detect internal defects in material structure. However, the correlation mechanism between stress waves and internal defects remains unclear during the AFP process. This paper proposes a novel experimental method to test stress waves, where continuous loading induced by process itself is used as an excitation source without other external excitation. Twenty-seven groups of thermosetting prepreg laminates under different processing parameters are manufactured to obtain different void content. In order to quantitatively estimate the void content in the prepreg structure, the relation model between the void content and ultrasonic attenuation coefficient is revealed using an A-scan ultrasonic flaw detector and photographic methods by optical microscope. Furthermore, the high-frequency noises of stress waves are removed using Haar wavelet transform. The peaks, the Manhattan distance and mean stress during the laying process are analyzed and evaluated. Partial conclusions in this paper could provide theoretical support for online real-time detection of internal defects based on stress wave characteristics.

Abstract. In combination with the advantages of parallel mechanisms and compliant mechanisms, a 5-DOF compliant parallel mechanism is designed to meet the requirements, such as large stroke, large load capacity, high precision and high stability, for a large-aperture grating tiling device. The structure and characteristics of the 5-DOF compliant parallel mechanism are presented. The kinematics of the mechanism are derived based on a pseudo-rigid-body model as well. To increase the tiling position retention stability of the mechanism, a closedloop control system with capacitive position sensors, which are employed to provide feedback signals, is realized. A position and orientation monitoring algorithm and a single neuron adaptive full closed-loop control algorithm are proposed. Performance testing is implemented to verify the accuracy and the tiling position retention stability of the grating tiling device. The experimental results indicate that the tiling accuracy reaches 0.2 µrad per step and 20 nm per step, and the tiling position retention stability can achieve 1.2 µrad per 30 min and 35 nm per 30 min in the rotational direction and the translational direction, respectively.

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