A 5-Axes Filament Winder with Software Control

This paper presents a filament winding system including a numerical control unit, a five-axes filament winding machine with heating device for thermoplastic prepregs, a micro-computer with controlling software PC-FIL 2.1. That software was firstly developed as PC-FIL 2.0 to control a 8-axes filament winder including the rotation of the mandrel, two translations and one rotation of the feed-eye and at last, two translations and two rotations of the heating head. The motions of both the feed-eye and the heating head were completely dissociated. III. This paper shows the simplifications realised to reduce from eight to five the number of axes to control. The controlling software PC-FIL 2.1 generates data for programming the control unit and also provides the user with simulation facilities, to visualize the process. The present version of PC-FIL 2.1 is available for revolution vessels of general shape.