Modelling of robotized lay up of CFC panels in aerospace industry: Technological and Economical aspects

Many technological advances are expected over the next years in the field of composite materials, mainly in the aircraft industry. The objective of this work is to describe the complete automation of laying process to produce high double curvature surfaces, as, for instance, the fuselage panels. The software program realized permits to compute the trajectories of the tapes and to realize various strategies to minimize gaps and angular deviations; the automatic tape laying head machine ATL is configured as an end effector to be hydraulically clamped to a gantry robot. The paper takes also into account the economic aspects of the problem: times and costs to produce a CFC panel are computed for both manual and robotized production cycles.