Inferring material properties from FRP processes via sim-to-real learning

Fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) provide favorable properties such as weight-specific strength and stiffness that are central for certain industries, such as aerospace or automotive manufacturing. Liquid composite molding (LCM) is a family of often employed, inexpensive, out-of-autoclave manufacturing techniques. Among them, resin transfer molding (RTM), offers a high degree of automation. Herein, textile preforms are saturated by a fluid polymer matrix in a closed mold.Both impregnation quality and level of fiber volume content are of crucial importance for the final part quality. We propose to simultaneously learn three major textile properties (fiber volume content and permeability in X and Y direction) presented as a three-dimensional map based on a sequence of camera images acquired in flow experiments and compare CNNs, ConvLSTMs, and Transformers. Moreover, we show how simulation-to-real transfer learning can improve a digital twin in FRP manufacturing, compared to simulation-only models and models based on sparse real data. The overall best metrics are: IOU 0.5031 and Accuracy 95.929 %, obtained by pretrained transformer models

FlowFrontNet: improving carbon composite manufacturing with CNNs

Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) are light yet strong composite materials designed to reduce the weight of aerospace or automotive components-contributing to reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Resin transfer molding (RTM) is a manufacturing process for CFRP that can be scaled up to industrial-sized production. It is prone to errors such as voids or dry spots, resulting in high rejection rates and costs. At runtime, only limited in-process information can be made available for diagnostic insight via a grid of sensors (e.g. ultrasound or pressure). We propose FlowFrontNet, a deep learning approach to enhance the in-situ process perspective by learning a mapping from sensors to flow front "images" (using upscaling layers), to capture spatial irregularities in the flow front to predict dry spots (using convolutional layers). On simulated data of 6 million single time steps resulting from 36k injection processes, we achieve a time step accuracy of 91.7% when using a 38 × 30 sensor grid with 1 cm sensor distance in x-and y-direction. On a sensor grid of 10 × 8, with a sensor distance of 4 cm, we achieve 83.7% accuracy. In both settings, FlowFrontNet provides a significant advantage over direct end-to-end learning models

FlowFrontNet: improving carbon composite manufacturing with CNNs

Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) are light yet strong composite materials designed to reduce the weight of aerospace or automotive components-contributing to reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Resin transfer molding (RTM) is a manufacturing process for CFRP that can be scaled up to industrial-sized production. It is prone to errors such as voids or dry spots, resulting in high rejection rates and costs. At runtime, only limited in-process information can be made available for diagnostic insight via a grid of sensors (e.g. ultrasound or pressure). We propose FlowFrontNet, a deep learning approach to enhance the in-situ process perspective by learning a mapping from sensors to flow front "images" (using upscaling layers), to capture spatial irregularities in the flow front to predict dry spots (using convolutional layers). On simulated data of 6 million single time steps resulting from 36k injection processes, we achieve a time step accuracy of 91.7% when using a 38 × 30 sensor grid with 1 cm sensor distance in x-and y-direction. On a sensor grid of 10 × 8, with a sensor distance of 4 cm, we achieve 83.7% accuracy. In both settings, FlowFrontNet provides a significant advantage over direct end-to-end learning models