A Modified Fast Marching Method for Defining Fiber Placement Trajectories Over Meshes

In this paper, we study the efficiency of applying the numerical simulation of a moving interface to the problem of defining fiber placement trajectories for composite structures. This new approach, which is based on an adaptation of the Fast Marching method, presents two advantages. Firstly, it simulates accurately the mechanism of an Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) machine by producing equidistant fiber courses, which avoids avoiding undesirable gaps or overlaps between the successive courses, while allowing to exploit the full capacity of the machine. Secondly, it is able to handle complex surfaces by working directly on the mesh instead of the geometric equation. Consequently, this new approach directly provides the local orientation of the fibers inside each mesh element, what is relevant for a finite element structural analysis. This approach is illustrated through some numerical examples taken from real case studies, for straight and curved fiber trajectories.