Fibre Path Planning for Automated Fibre Placement on Doubly Curved Structures

acm7 Tracking Number 14

Variable-stiffness laminates, enabled by automated fibre placement, offer improved structural performance through spatially varying fibre orientations. A three-step design framework comprising stiffness optimisation, fibre angle retrieval, and fibre path generation has been developed to realise such laminates, of which fibre path generation is the subject of this work. Doubly curved geometries with Gaussian curvature are predominant in aerospace structures, yet extracting streamline-based courses at prescribed spacing on such surfaces remains insufficiently addressed in the literature. This paper proposes a geodesic course extraction method that guarantees overlap-free placement on curved surfaces, with gaps tolerated as a design concession, demonstrated on a doubly curved geometry.