1974 to today: the AFP timeline
Fibre placement's history is a chain of bottlenecks. Each decade fixed the biggest one, and that revealed the next: steering (tows), material life and throughput (creels, more tows, faster heads), then, surprisingly, inspection, which ate more cycle time than laying. Speeding up the layup barely helps when something else dominates (Amdahl's law).
Predict · at 1:40 in the video
So suppose you build a head that lays twice as fast. How much faster does the barrel come off the line?
Only about twenty-three percent faster. Halving the layup time only shrinks the smaller part of the bar. The inspection part doesn't move at all.
Automated Fiber Placement: Status, Challenges, and Evolution, Ramy Harik & Alex Brasington.
- Chapter 1, section 4.B
Simulations in this lesson are our own. Where the numbers are invented to show a mechanism, the video says so on screen.
