ABSTRACT
The process of fibre placement is a combination of both static and dynamic steps that can be distributed in to several parts in a simulation environment to ensure that the process is exactly reproduced. The current paper describes an attempt made to simulate the dynamic step of laying the tape and its interaction with the mould or tool, the tape placement head or roller, and in subsequent steps, the already placed tape substrate. This simulation was carried out with an off the shelf finite element program called PAMFORM which was not developed for modeling the tape placement process. The results of the simulation are used to assess the quality of the bond in a thermoplastic laminate by comparing it to the inter-laminar shear strength of laminates produced using varying process parameters for validation. Improved simulation results were seen when shear thinning was taken into account during the process in addition to already existing models.
