Consolidated Fibre Placement (CFP) – Adhesive joining of consolidated fibre tapes.

High tolerance requirements during fibre placement bear specific challenges, such as long process times for the global process, caused by fibre preparation and matrix-curing. To ensure highest quality composites, a new production process for an economic production of large structures is proposed. Therefore, the bonding of unidirectional, pre-consolidated fibre tows to a load-specific global structure is investigated. With this approach, the fibre embedding is temporary decoupled from the fibre layup process. By producing a structure from optimally aligned fibres and with a hedged bonding process, an increase of the manufacturing-rate and quality is possible. To prove a general suitability of this approach, initial basic investigations are carried out. Those demonstrate if an adhesively fixed prepreg structure can compete with a pure prepreg structure. In a first sample series, reference samples of pure prepreg and adhesively fixed prepreg samples with different adhesives are investigated. For a second sample series, the prepreg-surfaces of the adhesively fixed samples have been pretreated with different methods before bonding. Finally, pressure-tests, 4-point-flexure tests and interlaminar-shear-strength test have been carried out with all samples. All test results have been compared with the reference sample. Investigations led to initial promising results and motivate to further pursue this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]