manufacturing
Carbon
F o o t p r i n t s
A major investment in worldleading
production equipment
has positioned Bristol’s National
Composites Centre at the forefront
of composites manufacturing.
Andrew Wade reports.
Located on the outskirts of Bristol,
the National Composites Centre was
conceived in order to help UK industry
push technological boundaries,
forging a path for new manufacturing
techniques. It is a testbed for the latest
in composites technology, a proofi ng
ground for machinery not yet mature enough for
the frontlines of industry, yet with the potential to
bring about major production step-changes.
iCAP is the NCC’s most recent programme of
investment. A sort of factory-laboratory hybrid,
the 10,000m2 space features 10 new machines,
purchased under a two-year acquisition project that
came in at £36.7m. With almost every component
across the new portfolio of machinery made
bespoke, the price tag is no surprise.
“There is one half of one piece of the smallest bit
of kit – so about 0.2 per cent of the programme value
– that’s off the shelf,” Peter Giddings, chief engineer
for the iCAP programme, told The Engineer.
“Everything else was built bespoke for us. In all 10
cases there is at least one thing that’s new to the
company, in seven of the ten, it’s new on Earth.
“These specifi cations have been turned right up.
Everyone has been stretched really hard because
if I buy a machine that does what a normal machine does, I’m
going to have a really hard time doing things that people haven’t
thought of.”
The new cohort of equipment includes Europe’s largest
carbon fi bre braider, which can automatically weave up to 288
strands of the material into elaborate hollow 3D geometries
for things like aircraft propellers. A new overmoulder is
demonstrating how composite components can now be produced
at scale, paving the way for automakers to incorporate more of
the material into
new lightweight
vehicles.
The jewel in
iCAP’s crown,
however, is a
massive new dualrobot
the specifications for
these machines have been
turned right up
cell for automatically laying huge swathes of carbon fi bre.
Known as the Ultra High Rate Deposition Cell (UHRDC), the
two robots - weighing 45 and 24 tonnes - measure, cut, lift and
place plies of carbon fi bre fabric with sub-millimetre accuracy.
When operating at its full potential, the machine could reduce
the number of carbon fi bre pieces needed for aircraft wings from
100,000 to just 150. What currently takes Airbus a week could be
done in a day.
But making these kinds of leaps brings a unique set of
challenges. For a start, the 2.5m carbon fi bre plies required for
April 2020 / www.theengineer.co.uk 14
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