Pipe Winding

HelpCadfil Help contents      HomeIconCadfil.com Home

Pipe winding is the most common form of filament winding and programs can be undertaken using the standard Cadfil-Axsym software The QuickCad Pipe winding options quickly generates winding programs and .Pay files for visualisation based on user specified parameters.

The pipe winding produced by this program is a double layer winding along the mandrel with a small dwell at each end to allow for a repeatable band-pattern. This parametric turns the fibre on the cylindrical portion allowing for simple extraction without having to cut the mandrel ends, thus it is only suitable for wind angles >40 degrees, for lower angles the turning zone becomes very long and hence there is much waste material. For lower angles the dome ended vessel parametric or the full Cadfil-Axsym system should be used. The user-specified parameters are:

Basic Pipe Dialog

Cylinder Radius: This is the radius of the cylindrical mandrel.

Clearance Radius: This is the distance of the fibre dispensing point from the axis of the cylinder. This MUST be bigger than the mandrel radius.

Start X Position: The start X position (i.e postion along the mandrel) can be set.The actual carriage position (in machine co-ordinates) can be modified by the Xdatum and Offsets during post-processing.

Total Length of Winding: This is the length of the winding band centre to band centre. This can be positive of negative as the winding will be from the Xstart position to Xstart position + Winding length. The overall extend of the winding will be half a bandwidth more at each end as the band centre position is programmed.

Friction Coefficient: The friction coefficient Mu is used to provide a none slip fibre turnaround at the mandrel ends. The fibre is progressively turned around at the outer end of the parallel length. The higher the value the shorter then length of the turn around will be. Values in the range 0.01 to 0.25 are usually used but this will vary with materials being used. It may not be possible to turn the fibre around if the friction coefficient is too small or the parallel length of the elbow is too short. The program will issue an error if this condition exists.

Fibre Band Width: The width of the fibre band used to determine the winding angle such that the cylinder is fully covered by a calculated number of carriage circuits.

Mandrel Direction +1,-1 Set this to 1 for positive mandrel rotation and -1 for negative mandrel rotation.

Angular Point Spacing (Deg). This value determines the point spacing around the mandrel for generating the payout path. If it is too large then the path looks irregular in the screen graphics, a default value if 12 degrees is usually given and should not be changed if there is no good reason.This value must be less than 180 degrees. It normally has no effect on the winding program as the system mergers blocks of motion that are effectively a continuation of the same motion. It does have an effect of creating more or less data points in a winding program if you gave disabled point merging features.

Band Thickness t0 Used to create TH2 thickness files for producing an FEA output.

Updated: 19 June 2024