Tailored Solutions
The majority of the braided products produced by A&P Technology are customized solutions created by A&P’s application engineers working hand in hand with fabricators and end users. Customizing reinforcements for specific applications optimizes the performance and the manufacture of composite parts. A&P’s engineers help make parts better with braid – braid designed specifically to meet our customers’ requirements.
Types of customization
Material Hybrids
Hybridizing material types within a braided reinforcement is sometimes chosen as a means of saving costs, increasing specific performance criteria, and in some cases, simply for aesthetics. By selectively locating areas for specialized reinforcement, a one-layer fabric can optimize specific property requirements.
Architecture Hybrids
To maximize ease of layup and optimize performance, a combination of biaxial and triaxial architectures in a single layer can be designed to have drape where needed and locate axial reinforcement where needed.
Angle Variations
With A&P’s braiding machinery all individual tow bundles are controlled independently, so if constant thickness is required on a part with changing cross- sections, the fiber angles of the individual tows can be changed without interrupting the braiding process, or if constant angle is desired the same can be achieved.
Contoured Bodies of Revolution
Initially developed and put into production for composite fan cases, braided fabrics designed to accommodate part contour allow for a consistent and repeatable layup for all bodies of revolution.The contour is created as the braid forms on product specific tooling and is locked in place by the triaxial architecture.The fiber orientation, directional content and localized regions of different materials can be altered as the architecture is optimized.
