TopComposite – Topology-optimized Design of Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composite Structures manufactured by Wet Fiber Placement

Wet Fiber Placement (Figure 1), a process that is currently developed at IVW, allows for manufacturing of complex shaped parts with extremely low weight and minimal use of materials. With such parts, production costs and operating costs can be saved, for example in the aviation or automotive sectors.

A suitable tool for design of components to be manufactured by Wet Fiber Placement is topology optimization. Hereby, material subject to low mechanical stress and therefore inefficient material is removed from a component. This usually results in extremely lightweight truss structures.

For the design of structures manufactured by Wet Fiber Placement, IVW uses a workflow (Figure 2) comprising of the following steps:

• Anisotropic topology optimization
• Derivation of placement paths
• Optimization of the number of fiber bundles to be placed along each path
• Mold design and production
• Definition of the placement sequence and lay-up
• Generation of machine code for production
• Manufacturing by Wet Fiber Placement

Thanks to the high degree of automation of the design approach, components with high lightweight potential can be developed very quickly. For topology optimization, an approach developed at IVW that considers the anisotropic material properties is used. The topology optimization result is then used for automatic derivation of placement paths with defined spacing – manual re-design of the paths is kept to a minimum. The lightweight potential can be exploited by subsequent optimization of the number of fiber bundles to be placed along each path (and thus optimization of the local component thicknesses). Afterwards, the component geometries are converted into a mold geometry, the placement sequence and lay-up are defined and a machine code is used for automated manufacturing using Wet Fiber Placement.

The project "TopComposite – Topology-optimized and resource-efficient composites for mobility and transport" is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding reference 03XP0259).