AN APPROACH TO OPTIMIZE AUTOCLAVES FOR CURING FRP COMPOSITES

Abstract

Composite materials due to their low weight, high specific strength, high stiffness & high specific thermal properties have always been a demanding material for advanced light aircrafts also the present trends indicate a huge demand for these composite components due to its high strength to its weight replacing the traditional metal parts in automotive and construction applications. These advanced fibre reinforced composites are cured using autoclaves under controlled cure parameters to achieve defect free high quality composite parts. Autoclave processing remains the backbone of advanced composite structure production and the productivity of a composite manufacturing industry rely on the utilisation of the Autoclaves. It is a need to utilize these autoclaves to its fullest volume so as to reduce the process cost per component. But at present these autoclaves are utilised only up to 40 - 50% of its volume result in under utilization and high processing cost. Hence producing high quality reliable composite materials in a large scale is a challenging task due to various manufacturing constraints. This paper focus on the issues and challenges considered for production scheduling and also a new approach called as the Autoclave Pull system is coined to optimise the autoclaves for curing composite materials. The results prove that the pull system is an efficient way to accomplish better productivity and to minimise the processing cost per part up to 50% and a significant increase in machine utilization by 30%.