Genetic Programming for Fiber-Threading for Fiber-Reinforced Plastics

Setting up fiber-threading for a pultrusion line is tedious, error prone and takes a long time. Between 100 and 1000 fibers have to be arranged into a two-dimensional shape, which have to be threaded between several support plates without causing crossovers. When manually planning this process based on intuition, it is hard to keep track of the complexity. This slows the process down to where it can take several hours or several days, and shortening this duration reduces the cost considerably. As planning the setup takes up a large chunk of time, we are proposing a simulation and an algorithm to automatically calculate how the fiber bundles need to be threaded from the creels through the support plates to result in the desired shape. Using a three-dimensional simulation for collision detection in conjunction with a genetic algorithm, we are able to shorten the planning of the fibers to around 10 minutes on a modern 8-core personal computer. Based on this data, further w ork can be done to further improve, visualize or permanently store the data in a digitized company.