Dr Evangelos Zympeloudis is the CEO and co-founder of iCOMAT, a company based in the UK that is developing automated manufacturing equipment for tow-steered composites. Fibre-reinforced plastics, such as carbon-fibre or glass-fibre composites, hold great promise for high-performance and lightweight design due to their excellent stiffness and strength properties at low material density. Traditional fibre-reinforced plastics are manufactured using straight uni-directional fibres or with straight fibres woven into a fabric.
Generally speaking, a fibre-reinforced composite derives its strength by aligning the fibres with the direction of the dominant load path. The novelty of tow-steered composites is that strips of composite material, so-called fibre tows, are steered along curvilinear paths such that the fibre direction is not straight, but varies continuously from point to point. This characteristic has benefits in structural design as the reinforcing fibres can now be used to smoothly tailor stiffness and strength throughout the structure. For example, tow-steered composites can be used to curve the reinforcing fibres around windows in an aircraft fuselage in order to improve strength and facilitate net-shape manufacturing.
In this episode of the Aerospace Engineering Podcast, Evangelos and I talk about:
- his background as an engineer and entrepreneur
- the manufacturing challenge of making defect-free tow-steered composites
- the capabilities of iCOMAT’s rapid tow-shearing process
- the benefits of tow-steering for manufacturing cost and design
- and some of the projects iCOMAT is currently working on
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Disclosure: I currently work with iCOMAT on a number of projects and am a consultant to the company.
