ScarfingTool: An Advanced Tool to Repair Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic
Description
Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) is going to assume more and more importance in mechanical and aerospace engineering in the near future. This is due to its intrinsic high lightness and resistance, if compared to traditional metallic materials. CFRP is characterized by a proper production and repair technology. The tool showed in this paper is conceived to repair and verify the restoration of such kind of material. Its application is limited to the first part of the repair process: in jargon the scarfing operation, otherwise called “defect removal”. This operation is similar to a high-speed grinding. For this reason, the designed tool can be easily applied to other contexts, such as sanding, polishing or deburring. Basically, the ScarfingTool is composed by a high-speed electro-spindle and a 3D smart snapshot sensor. This tool is conceived to be as light as possible to be installed on a light collaborative robot. Moreover, its specific design assures great compliance that, as needed, can be regulated. A high efficiency suction inlet completes the tool and guarantees a clean environment during operation. The scarfing process has already been dealt with in [1] to which the interested reader is addressed. A research article about this tool was published at the International Conference “SPIE Optical Metrology 2023”. See [9] for more details. This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) In this database there are all the CAD data to reproduce the ScarfingTool. The format supplied are: - .iam, .ipt (Autodesk Inventor Professional 2022) - .step - .stl (only for the 3D printed parts) The electrical and pneumatic diagrams are added in .vsd (Visio Professional) format. Most of the schemes and diagrams embedded in the paper are supplied in .vsd format too. A movie of the assembly procedure completes the project.