Design for Multi-Axis Fused Filament Fabrication with Continuous Fiber Reinforcement: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applications

Material extrusion additive manufacturing of continuous fibre reinforced polymer matrix composites: A review and outlook

“…Significant development has been achieved in composite ME in the last few years, especially for discontinuous fibre or particulate reinforced composites. Instead of toys and prototypes, real functional end use products are being developed in biomedical [79,140], electronics [82,42] and aerospace applications [154,162,145]. However, applications of continuous fibre reinforced composites manufactured by ME are rarely seen due to their early stage of development.…”

“…Since composite materials are much stronger in the fibre direction, therefore, fibres should be placed along the wing span direction for any meaningful application instead of in the transverse plane of the aerofoil section. Continuous fibre printing technology has been used in manufacturing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) frame [145]. A hexacopter was produced to demonstrate the manufacturing capability.…”

“…Other researchers have developed their own facilities by adapting commercially available open-source printers or by utilizing robotic arms for continuous fibre printing as discussed in Section 3 and 4. The studies using the open-source ME printers to produce printed parts were controlling the printers by writing their own G-codes [144,145,7,2,83,171,31,30,180,87,149]. This process can be labour intensive and time consuming as each customized structural part has different loading conditions and each layer could have different fibre paths.…”

“…However, few reviews were available focusing on continuous fibre composite ME and the ones available have been found not thorough and up-to-date enough. As a fast developing subsection of the technology, the literature has witnessed various modified ME processes which have been developed for continuous fibre composite printing in recent years [136,95,175,144,145,7], and some new mechanical testing results which were not available when the previous reviews were conducted [144,7,2]. Kabir et al [68] provided a very thorough summary of the mechanical properties of continuous fibre 3D printed composites including tensile, compressive, bending, bearing and fatigue properties, but similar to other previous reviews [13,12,20,39,45,181], a big part of the mechanical properties summarized was related to a single commercial printer and associated materials by the Markforged company [102].…”

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“…Approaches towards AM processes using continuous fibres can be found in the aerospace industry, where techniques such as Automated Fibre Placement and Automated Tape Laying are commonly used to manufacture high-performance components using carbon fibres [16] [17]. More recently, researchers proposed a fabrication method using continuous timber fibres filaments through robotic placement, combining the advantages of fibres-based manufacturing with bio-based materials [18].…”