Research On Control System And Head Of 7-Axis NC Fiber Placement Machine

As a kind of composites, fiber reinforce plastic has lots of good characters, such as light weight, anticorrosion, anti-fatigue damage, few machining, absorbing microwaves of the radar etc. It is widely used in aeronautics and astronautics industry.NC fiber placement basing on the fiber winding, is a kind of manufacturing advanced automatic manufacturing technique. Fiber placement equipment controlled by the computer system, can complete the assignments of fiber placement on the mandrel's surface following set locus. It can complete variable angle continuously placement, form concave curve surface, change the width of fiber belt. It also applies to manufacture the fiber reinforced product whose configuration is complex, such as the asymmetric revolving body with negative curvature, shell component with quirk or strengthening rib.According to the path of fiber placement, 7-aixs NC fiber placement machine should contain 3 translational degrees, 4 rotational degrees and the head. By improving the 6-axis winding equipment of CNC laboratory, reserved mainshaft C coordinate and three rectilinear X,Y,Z coordinates, added an wrist which has 3 rotational degrees. The head of fiber placement is controlled by the wrist and the machine tool. The head is the key device of the placement machine with complex structure. It places the fiber on the mandrel's surface. In the head, the main function modules are clamping, restarting, cutting, compacting. The four modules ordered in line, independent, the passages of the fiber can increased by adding the modules. The cylinders and servomotor complete the task in each module.The control mode of the placement machine is IPC+UMAC+PLC, this is an Open CNC System for 7-aixs fiber placement machine. IPC takes charge of the NC program format, condition monitoring etc. UMAC takes charge of the machine motion control, PLC controls logic control. This CNC software using on the Windows XP system, was developed by VC6.0. It was designed as modular. There are three modular in the software, Information Hinting, Manual Operation, Automatic Operation, which developed by dynamic link library PComm32 in UMAC. Human-Machine Interface is simple operation, convenient maintenance.