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In AFP manufacturing systems, manually inspection of parts consumes a large portion of total production time and is susceptible to missing defects. The aerospace industry is responding to this inefficiency by focusing on the development of automated inspection systems. The first generation of automated inspection systems is now entering production. This paper reviews the performance of the first generation system and discusses reasonable expectations. Estimates of automated inspection time will be made, and it will be shown that the automated solution enables a detailed statistical analysis of manufactured part quality and provides the data necessary for statistical process control. Data collection allows for a reduction in rework because not all errors need to be corrected. Expectations will be set for the accuracy for both ply boundary and overlap/gap measurements. The time and resource cost of development and integration will also be discussed.

Electroimpact Automatic Fiber Placement (AFP) machines lay-up composite parts by accurately placing carbon fiber tow (strips of impregnated carbon fiber) on a mold. In order to achieve high accuracy at high speeds, the processes of feeding and cutting tows must be tuned. Historically, the tuning has been a time-consuming, manual process. This paper will present a methodology to replace manual measurements with an automated laser, improve measurement speed by an order of magnitude, improve accuracy from +/- 0.020\mi (manual) to +/- 0.015\mi (laser), and eliminate human error.