3D printing of pseudo-woven continuous carbon fiber meta-skins

Additive manufacturing is reshaping the capabilities of fiber-reinforced polymer composites, pushing fabrication beyond the limits of traditional methods and setting new performance benchmarks across aerospace, automotive, sports, and defense applications. Therefore, this study introduces a generalized framework for the 3D printing of continuous carbon fiber pseudo-woven composite mechanical metamaterials, termed “meta-skins,” evaluates the processability and quality of printed specimens, and probes their impact efficacy as a function of interlacing pattern. Meta-skins were designed with unique repeating unit cells, defined by a generalized mathematical drafting plan expression, and then additively manufactured using an automated tow placement robotic printer. The dimensional quality was investigated using discrete and computerized approaches to understand the dispersion of printed tow widths as a function of architecture. Meta-skins were then subjected to dynamic impact loading using a fully instrumented drop tower, and their impact efficacy was compared to a benchmark hand-wet-layup counterpart. Optical postmortem characterization quantified damage severity using reconstructive profiling. The developed computerized tow measurement algorithm achieved an overall accuracy of 96.1%. Under low-velocity impact loading, the 3D-printed meta-skins outperformed the benchmark counterparts by almost twofold, as evaluated by peak resistance force (376 N → 746 N), impact event duration (3.98 ms → 6.3 ms), and absorbed energy (40% → 70%). Meta-skins exhibited increased damage tolerance, whereas the benchmark counterparts catastrophically failed under similar loading conditions. The outcomes of this research present a holistic AM-based framework using automated tow-placement to realize damage-tolerant, penetration-resistant pseudo-woven meta-skins, thereby introducing the next generation of lightweight, high-performance additively manufactured components.