For composites manufacturing processes such as automated fibre placement, filament winding or pultrusion, roving behaviour is crucial. Understanding and controlling these processes is only possible if material changes induced by guidance to the processing area are fully understood. Fibre placement system manufacturers such as Coriolis Composites use a creel to store and feed material to a placement head. Material deflection take place in the creel system as well as in the placement head itself, which unintentionally can impact the material prior to being processed.
In this work, a two-stage-approach is presented to address the topic of roving spreading properties for future application in guidance optimization. In the first phase, a manual spreading test rig was set up. It consists of three rollers whose position form an isosceles triangle on a rigid composition of aluminium profiles. The specimen used for the experiments were pre-cut, clamped to weights, measured in dimensions and applied to the setup. Through geometrical alterations in the setup, changes in spreading behaviour were observed and put into context with an existing spreading model developed by Wilson [1]. As a result, the lateral changes in width were studied in manifolds of three back-and-forth motions until equilibrium of spreading was achieved.
In the second phase, a configuration of five acetal rollers was set up on an automated spreading test rig. The used material was taken off continuously from a spool fixed on a mandrel. The roving was then initially measured in its cross-sectional dimensions by means of light sectioning sensor, then guided through the configuration of rollers and finally profiled again. An emphasis in this phase was put on the systematics to acquire profiling data and influences corrupting the experiments.