The Effect of Fiber Orientation on Temperature During Laser Assisted Fiber Placement

Laser assisted automated fiber placement is a key enabler for the production of large-scale aerospace parts. However, the desire for high placement rates and the associated difficulty to control the temperature, leads to a very narrow and sometimes unstable processing window. Process modelling tools can aid in finding the optimum placement parameters with fewer experimental iterations. In order for process models to be of use for such optimization purposes, these should capture the relevant physical mechanisms, including the fiber orientation, from both a thermal as well as optical viewpoint. This paper underlines that only accounting for the thermal aspects is not sufficient to predict temperature differences due to varying fiber orientation on the substrate. This suggests that an improved optical model is needed which takes into account the effects of fiber orientation to compute the heat distribution from the laser source.