Feed Rate & Velocity
Placement speed is never truly constant. Every acceleration, deceleration and curve changes how long the material sees the heat source, and therefore how hot it gets.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Velocity is one of the strongest levers on temperature in automated fibre placement (AFP). Understanding heat input relative to the placement rate, and compensating for it, is essential for consistent quality along the whole course.
The general rule holds for every heat source: hot gas torches, infrared heaters, lasers and pulsed light.
The critical moments
- Start of a course: the head accelerates, the material dwells and over-heats
- End of a course: deceleration and cut, with the same risk
- Curved paths: on steered or doubly curved tooling the local speed varies
- Machine limits: axis dynamics on complex parts cap the achievable speed
What happens inside the material
Less time to soak in
At high speed, heat has less time to diffuse through the thickness, so the surface and the interface drift apart.
Heat carried along
Moving material carries heat with it, which shifts the temperature peak relative to the nip point.
Non-uniform quality
Larger gradients along the plied layers mean inhomogeneous bonding, crystallinity and residual stress.
How OTOM compensates
Read the real speed profile
The velocity along every course comes from the machine programme (G-code, XML or RAPID), not from an assumed constant.
Simulate the transient temperature
The thermal model follows heating and cooling station by station, including the start and end of each course and heat left by earlier plies.
Adapt laser power to speed
Laser power is optimised per station to hold the target temperature as velocity changes, within limits on power change per step.
Verify
The optimised schedule is checked against thermal-camera recordings with the IR Cam module.
Faster lay-up without losing quality
We find how fast your process can run and the power schedule that keeps the temperature uniform.