On July 12, Feng Changzheng, the leader of the research and development project of large-scale composite automatic laying and forming equipment of the China Academy of Aeronautical Manufacturing Technology (hereinafter referred to as the Aviation Industry Manufacturing Institute), was debugging and testing several robotic automatic laying machines to be delivered together with technicians.
The equipment can measure and customize new large aircraft, which is mainly used for laying and manufacturing large and complex composite components such as aircraft fuselage and tail cone.
In 2005, the Aviation Industry Manufacturing Institute began the journey of independent research and development of automatic molding equipment for composite components. In October 2022, the Aviation Industry Manufacturing Institute delivered a new generation of robotic automatic silk laying machine to the aviation main engine factory. It has been proved that the technical level is comparable to the world's advanced, breaking the dilemma that this technology is subject to people for a long time, and realizing the whole chain of the "material + process + equipment + software" technical system.
The design and manufacture of automatic molding equipment for composite components is a comprehensive technology, involving materials, processes, equipment and software, and the collaborative accuracy error cannot exceed 0.01 mm.
Due to the abnormity of the member, the laid tow must be deformed at any time. Therefore, the biggest problem in the development of automatic wire laying machine is to feed the tow into cutting and lay the tow evenly with different widths.
"First find the adhesive, that is, the prepreg, and stick the 'silk' together to make a 1500 meter long prepreg tow; In order to ensure the high-speed long distance laying, according to the design of precise cutting, so that the unequal width of the tow does not deformation." Feng Changzheng said.
In 2019, technicians successively conquered key technologies such as "tension, temperature, pressure, and accuracy of tow feed cutting and laying", and built an independent research and development team of wire laying machine.
In the past three years, the R & D team has solved many problems such as the misalignment of the wire laying equipment, the loss of speed, the instability of tension, the loss of wire breaking (separate and inseparable), and the algorithm failure, and finally made the high-end automatic wire laying machine independently developed can be successfully applied to aircraft manufacturing.
