Customer Day Automated Ply Placement 2023

8 February 2023

Composites Automation Facility

The Hague, Netherlands

Customer Day - Automated Ply Placement 2023

Special topic: Thermoplastic material processing

Introductions, including guest speaker(s)

Demonstration and Q&A: Automated Ply Placement with Thermoplastic composites

Networking with automation specialists, OEMs, part manufacturers, material suppliers,

technology providers, R&D institutions and more

Other demonstrations and Q&A

Laminates & Preforms

Cutting Room Operations

Resin Dispensing

Airborne Aerospace tour

Speaker

Udo Steinhauer from Profol was one of the main speakers and presented the

”Efficient high-volume production of sustainable lightweight composites”

Panel Discussion Participant Companies

Highlights

Automated Ply Placement

We have created the Automated Ply Placement technology, the only automation method in the market that can make such optimised laminates. It provides you the capability to design any composite laminate for optimised preformance and manufacture them with a high-rate, industrialised manufacturing system. In prepreg, dry fibre and thermoplastic composite. The system converts rolls of materials into freeform, multi-material, tailored blank laminates using the Automated Ply Placement technology: plies are cut into the right shape and with advanced pick and place technology the tailored blank laminate is created.

The plies can be any shape, straight or with a freeform contour, and holes are no problem. These plies are placed and stabilised with spotwelding, to create a preform or laminate. Prepreg can be placed directly, after the protective backing paper or film is removed by the system.

Many materials can be handled: fabric, tape, core material, film or metallic layers. Thickness variations and ply drop-offs are not a problem and on-the-fly adjustment of the robot controls ensures high precision placement.