Toasting CFRP parts - Cellular heatable tooling and infrared thermography assisted process time stabilisation of full scale CFRP parts in curing processes

Abstract

The topic of lightweight plays an essential role in the development of aircraft. More and more carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) find a steady growing demand in aircraft manufacturing and are equipped in their latest generation with over 50% of the total structure weight. This development is offset by labor-intensive manufacturing processes that cause very high costs for the components. This is the reason why it is important to provide rapid and cost-effective production processes today and in the near future to counteract the striven production rate of 70 AC/month. An essential step for the above-mentioned objective is the investigation of the benefits of an innovative control system for in and out of autoclave processes: a segmentally heatable curing tool and an infrared camera system were integrated completely into the existing plant engineering of the research autoclave in Stade. Besides an improvement of the manufacturing quality, a time saving for the energy-intensive autoclave process and thus a reduction of the manufacturing cost is expected with this approach.