Khalifa University

Aerospace Holding Company LLC

Rehan Umer

Dongming Gan

Jorge Dias

Lakmal Seneviratne

Wesley James Cantwell

Jian S Dai

A single-skinned composite lattice sandwich structure includes a face sheet, fiber stringers, and at least one fiber tow arranged in a lattice structure separating the face sheet and fiber stringers. The face sheet and at least the fiber tow(s) forming the lattice may be interfused with a matrix to form a contiguous composite structure. The fiber stringers may be formed of various materials for imparting different structural properties to the sandwich structure, including carbon fiber for tensile strength and lightness, metallic or other rigid material for imparting overall structural rigidity, shape-changing material or actuated material for providing actuated deformation of the structure, and may also include sensors.

Lightweight composite single-skin sandwich lattice structures

The present invention introduces a new concept of applying a parallel mechanism in automated fiber placement for aerospace part manufacturing. The proposed system requirements are 4DOF parallel mechanism consisting of two RPS and two UPS limbs with two rotational and two translational motions. Both inverse and forward kinematics models are obtained and solved analytically. Based on the overall Jacobian matrix in screw theory, singularity loci are presented and the singularity-free workspace is correspondingly illustrated. To maximize the singularity-free workspace, locations of the two UPS limbs with the platform and base sizes are used in the optimization which gives a new design of a 4DOF parallel mechanism. A dimensionless Jacobian matrix is also defined and its condition number is used for optimizing the kinematics performance in the optimization process. A numerical example is presented with physical constraint considerations of a test bed design for automated fiber placement.

Parallel mechanism based automated fiber placement system

Growing community of inventors

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Rehan Umer