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(Left to right): David Mollenhauer, AFRL; Kevin Rogers, Victrex; Isaac Schmitz and Waruna Seneviratne, WSU-NIAR. Photo Credit: WSU-NIAR

After several months of joint effort, Victrex (Lancashire, U.K. and  Conshohocken, Pa., U.S.) and the (NIAR) at Wichita State University (WSU, Kan., U.S.) have developed material and process specifications for automated fiber placement (AFP) systems according to NCAMP protocol.

NCAMP, the university’s National Center for Advanced Materials Performance, works with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and industry partners to qualify material systems and populate a shared materials database that can be viewed publicly. 

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NIAR’s Advanced Technologies Laboratory for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) has begun manufacturing test panels using Victrex AE250 polyaryletherketone (PAEK), a thermoplastic material system reinforced with IM7 carbon fibers. This is a part of the Modeling for Affordable Sustainable Composites (MASC) program, sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, U.S.). MASC focuses on developing a certification framework for enabling novel materials and advanced structural concepts used for automated manufacturing technologies.

According to NIAR-WSU, this is the first time a program has conducted an in-depth investigation into the variability of multiple AFP machines on the composite allowables generated using industry-standard statistical procedures outlined in Composite Materials Handbook 17.

The project includes qualification of several thermoset, thermoplastic and dry-fiber AFP material systems from Hexcel (Stamford, Conn., U.S.), Solvay (Alpharetta, Ga., U.S.), Toray (Morgan Hill, Calif., U.S.) and Victrex. All of the data and associated documents will be included in the NCAMP shared material database. 

In order to mitigate risks due to machine variability, a series of pre-qualification manufacturing trials were conducted to develop machine programming protocols to manufacture equivalent panels across various AFP machines. These machine agnostic allowables can then be used by a wide variety of certification programs regardless of the type of AFP machines used for production. The AFP panel manufacturing kickoff was witnessed by NCAMP airworthiness representatives and personnel from the Air Force Research Laboratory and Victrex.