Recently, Sheffield University and Boeing Company’s advanced manufacturing Research and Development Center (AMRC) to invest 150,000 pounds to buy a multi-Neil Fast Rapier loom (FT Dornier Rapier loom).

The project team said the purchase was designed to produce fabrics according to the parameters they wanted to improve the RTM process.

“RTM is a rapid prototyping process, but the pursuit of speed is often prone to error.” Jody Turner, from AMRC, said, “In many cases, the resin is not fully infiltrated, the fabric is a large part of the dry, such production is useless.” So we decided to figure out what went wrong in the RTM process.

The team used carbon fiber fabric as an example to find that in the RTM process, although the fabric itself is highly symmetrical, the resin does not flow and infiltrates in a symmetrical path.

The team believes that this must be because the fabric of the yarn, in different parts of the tension varies. With this fast loom, they can observe and study the relationship between yarn tension and resin flow by testing warp and weft yarns under different tension conditions.

If we can effectively control the warp and weft tension, we might be able to control the flow of the resin,” he said. Turner said. And once their research projects are successful, they may add more strength to the finished product.