Zsolt Kállai

This paper presents an innovative approach that combines multi-axis fused filament fabrication (FFF) with continuous carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) to evaluate the feasibility of manufacturing rotationally symmetric CFRP pipes without mandrels or support structures. Traditional methods, such as filament winding, encounter limitations with geometric complexity and require tooling that makes them unsuitable for producing complex, individual parts. The proposed process uses the manufacturing flexibility of FFF and advantageous material properties of CFRP to create rotationally symmetric pipes on-demand. In this article, the experimental setup is described, the material and process-related challenges are discussed and a preliminary study that involves the printing of rotationally symmetric pipes to verify the viability of the process is presented. The findings aim to advance additive manufacturing techniques, enabling the production of lightweight, customized pipes for various industrial applications, and establishing this method as a cost-effective and efficient alternative.

There has been considerable research in recent years on the additive manufacturing (AM) of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) parts based on the process of fused deposition modeling (FDM). The currently-applied steps within the manufacturing pipeline, such as slicing and path planning, consider only the planar case of filament deposition and mostly make no use of the possibility to place single pre-impregnated (prepreg) filaments. Classical methods such as tape-laying and laminating struggle with highly curved and complex geometries and require the costly production of molds, whereas when using AM, these geometries can be realized more easily and molds can be created using the same process. In this paper, a set of algorithms is presented that aims to resolve these problems. Criteria are formulated which enable the goal oriented development and evaluation of the presented methods and represent metrics for future methods. The developed algorithms enable the use of both continuous and discontinuous fiber patches in a much wider range of applications in designing and manufacturing of CFRPs. This opens up new possibilities in this promising field. The developed metrics and infrastructure further constitute progress in the field of multi-axis non-planar path planning for slicing algorithms in general and the conducted evaluation proves the formal applicability of the developed algorithms.