Intro to Autodesk Composite Manufacturing Platform

MICHAEL SPELLMAN: Good morning, everybody. OK. I'm going to kick things off. I'm Michael Spellman, Director of Composite Manufacturing and Cutting at Autodesk, under the Digital Manufacturing Group. Just to give you some background on my history, I've been in the composite industry for over 24 years, for the past 24 years. I was formerly co-founder of Majestic Systems, where I acted as the CTO of the company, where I developed, designed, and architect solutions for nesting, laser projection, automatic fiber placement, and tape laying for composites.

Just kind of looking at the history of how we've progressed with the products, back for instance in 2010, we actually won the very first Innovation Award for Composites Excellence at the JEC show. That was the first award given for software. The next year, we actually won the same award for TruPlan, and then finally in 2012, we actually won the award for TruFiber. If you take a look at some of the companies, just about every major aerospace company in the world is actually using our technology for composites. And of course, we also use it in other industries like construction, transportation, and energy.

And so today in this class, what we're going to be talking about is composite materials, particularly carbon fiber. And as you know, they are some of the hottest materials today. And they're renowned for their high strength and weight ratio. Carbon fiber parts are becoming more popular in traditional fields as automotive and construction. And this class will introduce Autodesk's new composite manufacturing platform.

So some of the things that you're going to learn during this class are the steps needed to do the hand layup process, how to actually create manufacturing strategies for composites, how to analyze material defects, and how to create fiber paths. So just to start off with, I'm going to do a quick introduction on what composite manufacturing is.

Just with a show of hands, how many know about composites today? How many use composites? OK. Are there any people in the audience who are not familiar with composites? No. So I think there are a couple of parts that are being passed around. So just some sample parts. You may just want to pass it around. This is a composite board, a composite laminate board. And I think there's another part, Matt, that you've got passing around that's actually been laid up with fiber placement. So you could pass it around. You get an idea of what the strength of composites are and why they're so widely used.

So when you think about composite materials, composites could be anything. It could be something like as simple as plywood. Composite is having something that's made out of more than one material. And so typically when we talk about composites, we talk about it being based off of two different types of constituents, that being the fibers and the actual matrix that actually holds it together.

And then when we talk about what are composites, when people are doing composite design, typically what we're looking at, to get better strength, what we typically do is we're going to use several layers of material. And what you're doing by using the different layers of material, you're adding the strength by changing the direction of the fibers. That's going to give it strength, of course, by having more layers and having them go in more directions.

And if you take a look at some of the charts, why do we use composites versus other materials? And really looking at why that's being used, you could just see the strength and weight ratio, it's just a much larger area when you have composites. And so with composites, because we can use multiple layers, we can actually tailor how we want the performance of the material to be, at the same time being able to lightweight it.

And when we talk about where composites are used, I'm just going to show you two quick videos in terms of what are the typical uses for composite materials? In this video, you're seeing the typical hand layup process. Parts get cut on the cutting table first. They then get kitted together, where they have to build up a particular part.

Now they're doing the hand layup process, which is actually guided by laser projection to help them layup that part. A lot of times they'll have to vacuum bag that material down and do some other things. And then they'll actually put it in the autoclave to actually cook the part. And that's the whole land layup process. That's the whole cycle that you would do for hand layup.

If you take a look at one of the other processes that maybe you didn't see in that video, during that hand layup process, how did they know exactly where to place that particular part or how to place that particular ply?

Typically today, what they use is laser projection. And what laser projection does is it guides the person how to actually align that piece. And that's really important, because you want to locate that ply in the exact location in order to get the proper performance of it, because for instance, if you turn those fibers in the wrong direction when you lay it up, you're not going to get the performance that you want for the part. And that would be a really bad thing. For instance, if you're going to build a part that's going to be flying on an airplane and it's a structural part, if you don't have that proper performance, something bad could possibly happen. And so that's really the worst situation.

So with laser projection, it's going to show you exactly where to align that piece, but it's also going to show you where the direction of fibers are supposed to be. And so laser projection is now a standard in the industry when you're building composite parts, especially for hand layup. It's like augmented reality.

And in fact, one of the other courses that we have-- I believe it's on Thursday-- is going to be a course on part of the platform that I'm going to be showing today. I believe in the room, we'll actually have a laser projection on site. And that way you get a better idea of what laser projection is actually all about.

So laser projection is just one of those processes that you saw on that earlier video. And so hand layup is one process. Another process that's very similar to hand layup would be forming. There are probably some courses here at AU as well this week. A course on RTM, Resin and Transfer Mechanism.

So with that process, you're using dry fibers. You're actually not using the resin already impregnated in the material. And so for that process, very similar process. You still have to cut those dry fibers out. And then typically those dry fibers are either hand layup or laid up by a machine that would place them in. And then you would put those into a mold where you would inject the resins to pressurize that component. So those are the two kind of hand lay up processes.

Another process, of course, that's really interesting is automatic fiber placement. And this is some of the software that we have developed to drive this equipment. Of course, this machine is a multi-million dollar machine. The parts that they're working on are extremely expensive as well, because there are a lot of materials that get put on the parts. The tools that have to hold that part and support that part also extremely expensive. You could see there's a lot going on in terms of driving this machine, because on this machine it has a lot of different fibers. It has a lot of different tows on this machine.

And what we're actually doing is we're controlling which tows are actually being deposited on the machine as it rolls across those surfaces. We're also controlling how much compaction we're putting on that surface. We're also controlling how much heat is being turned on when we run that process. And so this is an example of an automatic fiber placement machine, which is run on a piece of gantry equipment.

A similar type of process-- again, this is also automatic fiber placement. The difference with this is this is with robotics. And today you take a look at this technology, this technology obviously very expensive. And in terms of the number of machines that are out there, you're not going to find thousands and thousands of these machines out there. And that's why even today hand layup is still very popular.

In fact, when these machines first came to the market, a lot of people in the industry saying, you know what? It's going to be the end of hand layup. It's never going to be used anymore, because you're going to be able to automate this process and everybody's going to use that process. But there's still room for all of these different processes that you're going to do with composites.

And I believe over time the price on this equipment is going to come down substantially. You're already seeing the prices go down. And you're starting to see this become much more popular. In fact, especially with the robotic machines, because they can get into smaller areas and have a little bit more control.

When you take a look at the different target markets that we talk about for composites, again, at the top of the chart, you're seeing the automatic fiber placement and tape layup, and those are being used in industries, of course, like aerospace. Believe it or not, it's starting to be used and very popular in construction.

Why is it being used in construction? You're hearing all kinds of stories where bridges have fallen down, because they're using metal and they're corroding or using some other structures. With composites, it doesn't corrode. So it has a lot of properties that give it better performance. It's also used quite often in the creation of the wind turbine blades.

A lot of times they'll be using what's called tape layup instead of fiber placement. And the difference between tape layup and fiber placement, using very similar type of equipment, but there it's a big piece of tape. So it's putting out one big piece of tape along that wing blade. And usually they use that type of material when they want to deposit a huge amount of material. When you take a look at those wind turbine blades, they're tremendous. They're almost the size of an aircraft. You can actually walk inside of one of those.

At the next level, you have what we call the traditional hand layup. And of course, that's used quite often in things like automotive. But the other areas that hand layup is also being used in these areas is, as I was talking about that RTM process, where you're going to be doing forming for the parts. And so today we're really going to talk more about the hand layup process and the AFP process itself.

In addition to that, there are other processes that are coming onto the market. Well, actually filament winding has been on the market for quite some time but now you're actually seeing some new applications like braiding where you're actually using robots to actually push the part through a spool of threads that are actually braiding the parts. So that's something that's becoming a much more widely used technology.

If you take a look at the different steps that actually get created to do what I would call a full end-to-end solution for composites, where do things start from? First, you start with the design of the composite part. So at the design of that composite part, you have conceptual design, you've got the applied design and the structural simulation that's going on. And usually this is in a loop that's happening at the design stage. This is really where we're actually starting this process. And that's what I'm going to be talking about from this line forward.

Here, we're talking about a design for a process. So here's where we're using manufacturing design and manufacturing simulation. That's one of the things I'm going to be showing you today, which is called true plan. That's going to show us how the material performs for a particular process. And so what we're going to be talking about is two different processes there. We're going to be talking about doing the simulation for fiber placement, but we're also going to be talking about doing the simulation for hand layup.

And then depending on what your process is, you may go down a couple of different paths. When you talk about automatic fiber placement and ATL, one of the first things that you have to do after you do the simulation of the manufacturing process, you're actually going to need to generate the tool path. How do you drive that machine that we were just shown on the video?

And then once you generate that tool path, the next thing that you actually have to do is you have to do some manufacturing simulation. And why do you have to do the manufacturing simulation? Well, when you look at the expense of that machine that we just showed up there before, it's extremely expensive. And the tools that you're building it on are also extremely expensive. And so if there's any point of failure that goes on, it's really critical that you catch it.

So any time a part like that actually gets generated by a tool path algorithm, you have to have a simulation process to validate that it's actually going to work perfectly. Then after that process, of course, is you actually have to drive the machine tool itself. And that's where you actually have to generate an NC code for that process.

So generating the NC code for the process is not necessarily the same as generating the tool path. And the reason for that is, just as I showed you before, you can have two different types of machine tools that are running that. One could be a robotic arm. Another could be a gantry machine. So you then have to generate the inverse kinematics to actually drive the equipment that generates the NC code for that.

If we take a different track, and we actually go down the track of the hand layup, here's where we have to do some nesting, because these composite materials are typically coming on rolls of material. You're going to put that on a cutting machine just like you saw in the very first video. That's where you're going to optimize that material and get the best efficiency out of it. Then you're going to, of course, send it down to the cutting machine itself that's going to cut that process up.

On the cutting machines, they may have a whole bunch of other devices on it, like labelers, or sometimes they will even have pick-and-place machines to help you do the kitting process. That's something that will be generated. And then once you come off the cutting machine, you could then branch off into two different areas.

One area is where you're going to do the hand layup, and that's where you're going to be guided by the laser projection to help you lay up that part. But another track that you could take is you could do a forming process, where maybe you did the lay up inside the mold. And then you're going to do an RTM processor or some other forming process that's going to go on.

Now, eventually all of these are going to meet up at the end, whether you go through the automated process or the more traditional draping and nesting process. And it's at that point, after that part gets cooked, you're typically going to run some kind of inspection on that part to validate did it actually-- did the part actually come out correct, the way that you thought it was going to be?

There's a lot of variability that goes on in composites. Just the material itself, there's some variability in terms of what that thickness is. So sometimes you actually have to inspect that part to even check if the thickness is proper, because it may not be something that you can actually control.

You could control it as much as you want, but as you build that part up, because of that variability, in terms of just the thickness of the material and the whole autoclave process itself of cooking that part, it could be a slight tolerance off. And then we actually have a very special process where what we can do is after we inspect that part, we could kind of run an adaptive process on that part to actually build it back up into tolerance.

Now, once you get past the point where you know that the part is valid and it's secure, then that part can go off to a bunch of other processes. Maybe at that point, you could run some of the Delcam operations where you're going to go ahead and doing some trimming and drilling on the part. And then maybe it's going to go to some other processes, maybe where you're painting it in the shop and so on. So this, in general, is kind of an introduction of, as I said, of what composites is all about. Any questions on that so far? Good.

So the next thing I want to talk about is something that I call the composite data model. Before we can actually start to manufacture the part, how do we know what it is that we need to do? And so to do that, what we have actually built is just this year we've launched the TruPlan product under Autodesk. Prior to this, this product was actually running on top of CATIA.

And so what does the composite data model look like? So the composite data model allows us to define the recipe of what this part looks like. Here, what we see is we see all the sequences that are actually going to build the parts up. And what does the sequence mean? The sequence is basically those steps.

Remember that first slide that we saw where we saw all those materials stacking up at the different directions? So that's what the sequence is. It's the first step. It's the first layer of material that you're laying down. And then when you go on to the next sequence, it's the next layer. Now, underneath each of those sequences, you then have plys. The plys are actually the boundaries that are making up that particular shape. And that's what you're going to be laying up.

Now, when we take a look at this, each of those sequences are actually based off of-- they're actually based off of a layup. And what the layup is, is the layup is the surface of the material. So that dictates what the surface of the material. Typically today, when composites are designed, when you design a surface that you're going to be building something off of, you actually design it all on top of that surface. You don't actually design each of the surfaces independently.

And there are actually two reasons for that. The first reason is a composite design could in some cases have hundreds of plys and hundreds of sequences on top of that surface. And rather than building up every single surface in the design, that could take a lot of horsepower on the computer. That can make the design extremely heavy. And so for that, that's one reason why it's better practice to design it off of that surface and just have the understanding that it's going to be built up by a particular material thickness.

But the other important thing is, even if you did do that-- let's say we had infinite compute power, and we could do all of that, and that wasn't an issue. What happens if you make a change? If you make one little change on the material thickness or some of the other properties, all of those surfaces have to be recalculated all over again. So the typical way that we've designed these things are off of a particular surface.

So for instance, in this particular one, what we're actually looking at is we actually have two surfaces. There's a flat surface on the bottom, where we have four plys that are being stacked up. Then there's some core that's being put on top of that surface. And then we have what's actually the over-core surface, which is the next surface. And then there are a couple of other laminates that are on top of that. In fact, that little floor board that we passed around, that actually has three different components. You've got some composite laminate on the bottom. You've got some core between it and then another composite laminate on top of that part.

And so when you take a look at the properties of what the layup has defined in it, the layup has the actual surface that we're referencing. It has a direction of what we're defining is the build-up area, because if I have a surface, how do I know if I'm building it up this way or if I'm building it up coming down below? So that's what's defining that direction.

And of course, it also has a rosette. The rosette is the coordinate system that dictates what the origin of that is. So whenever we reference a ply to that surface, it's off of that base origin. And then when we take a look at what the definition of the ply looks like, the ply actually has a boundary that we're representing.

The ply also has the orientation that we're going to do for that particular ply. And then there's some other information that we could put on there, in other words, to tell us how much do we want to do a thickness update as we're actually building up this process or do we want to actually generate-- do we want to displace some out of boundaries for a particular ply, just to make sure that we're in tolerance to generate some of the results that we're looking for?

So in a few minutes, I'm going to show you a slide on what that process actually looks like. And we're going to be talking about what we call strategies. So at this point, we talked about how do you design a composite part? What does that composite data model look like? But one of the things that's going to happen is as you start to build up your composite data model, you're going to start to create a bunch of these things that we call strategies. Inside a TruPlan, what we've built is an infrastructure that actually allows you to create manufacturability for a particular process.

And so today what we've done inside of TruPlan is we've created manufacturability for many of the different strategies for automatic fiber placement and automatic tape laying. And in fact, this afternoon there's a class-- I believe it's, what, 3:00, Matt? So at 3:00 is a hands-on training class, where you can actually do some hands-on training to go through this process. It'll take you through all of those different strategies on how you could go ahead and perform it. And what that's going to do is it's going to give you the feedback as to show you is this material going to work on that surface or is this strategy going to be proper for that? So that's one type of strategy for fiber placement.

Another strategy would be hand layup. How does that strategy work for hand layup? How is the material warping when we drape it over the material? But the reality is, you could have many composite strategies. Every day, there are new techniques that come up in manufacturing. And so who knows? Tomorrow there could become another strategy that comes online. And guess what? What we've created here on this platform is an infrastructure that allows us to add in new strategies on top of this platform.

And so when we do these strategies, you can actually have multiple strategies for building this part up. What if I want to go ahead and I want to simulate what is it going to take and what's it going to cost to do this in a hand layup process versus putting this on an automated piece of equipment? You can actually put both of those strategies in the data model. And what you could come up with is we come up with things that we call manufacturing configurations.

And so within TruPlan, you could set up these manufacturing configurations that allow you to track which strategies do you want to do for hand layup? What strategies do you want to do for automatic fiber placement? And you could come up with as many configurations as you want. And that makes it easier for you as designer or the manufacturer to actually compare these different strategies versus trying one and deleting it and then adding another one.

And so the next thing I'm going to talk about is just the hand layup process itself. This is some technology that was actually built in conjunction with the OCTO team with the offices, the CTO, that's the research and development part of Autodesk, they developed the draping algorithm. And what we've done is we actually have that built into TruPlan at this point. And so what it's actually doing is it's figuring out how that material is going to drape over that particular part. It's also doing the math that's actually going to do the flattening for that particular part as well. And we'll see some solutions for that in a moment.

So this is just a video on the draping. So inside of TruPlan, you're seeing that we're going ahead, we're selecting a part. The very first thing that we're doing is we're going ahead, and we're adding a strategy. At this point, we're going ahead, and we're actually selecting what type of material that we're using. We're specifying what is the cell size when we're doing the draping itself? That's referred to as warp and weft. That's actually the size that we want to actually do the simulation for.

In addition to that, we actually want to place what we call a seed point or seed curve. This is going to dictate how we're going to do that strategy when this lays up, because when you're laying something up by hand or even if you're laying it up in fiber placement, it will make a difference where you actually start something from.

So for instance, if I try to drape something on this table, and I start at the corner over here and work my way to the end of that, it's obviously going to be more accurate over here in the corner, by the time I get to the end of that table. And vice versa, if I started on that corner and come this way, it'll be more accurate over there.

So depending on where you do that seed point with that seed curve where you guide the draping path, it's going to make a difference in terms of the draping algorithm. And this is showing you how it's going ahead and it's doing that draping in that 0-degree orientation across this part. I'm going to let those slides go just a little bit longer, because within the slide we'll actually start to see where we're going to run the flattening. So any questions on this so far?

AUDIENCE: When you're designing [INAUDIBLE] off a single service and then stacking a picture like a window [INAUDIBLE] were going up and you can see that doesn't it grow out?

MICHAEL SPELLMAN: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's really important. When we first started TruPlan, because TruPlan has actually been on the market for some time now, but before we were actually providing the manufacturability for fiber placement and tape layup. But we were actually using another platform. That other platform already had this composite data model. They actually had built the infrastructure to support that.

And so one of the things that you have to do when you're building off of that surface is you have to have an understanding of knowing how thick the material is. And then what you actually need is you need an engine that's actually going to do what we call the thickness update.

And so what it's actually doing is it's actually offsetting those surfaces automatically for you, based on the thickness of that one layer. And then it places the next layer on top of that and so on and so on and so on. So it understands that composite data model. It also has the information, and it has the knowledge of how to build up that material.

So at any point, you can actually do what we call a core sample, where you can actually look at any location on that design that you've made. And you can actually test how thick it is at a certain location. Because when you're laying these plys down, you may not actually lay these plys down across the whole surface. They may just be laid down off of a partial portion of the surface. And so that was one of the challenges for us when we actually created this new platform at Autodesk is we had to build this new data model. We had to build this new infrastructure that provided the thickness update to achieve that. And so here you could kind of see we're producing the flat pattern as well as the draping simulation. And you'll notice that if we do the same kind of draping at 0 degrees versus, let's say 45 degrees, that solution is going to look quite different.

AUDIENCE: Is it going to save any [INAUDIBLE]

MICHAEL SPELLMAN: So yes, certainly. So the draping is definitely going to give you information that's going to tell you where the distortion is. So right now what we're doing is we're running the strategies. So the strategies are just the approach that you want to try. It doesn't mean it's a good approach. It doesn't mean it's a bad approach.

To understand if it's good or bad, what you actually then have to do is you have to run some analysis on those strategies. And so that's the next piece that would come out of that. And so the analysis will tell you all different types of information. We're going to actually get to that in a moment. You'll start to see what some of the analysis looks like. So for instance, where this left off, you could see that 45 was a little bit different than what the 0-degree orientation was.

So now that we've really gone through what I would call the design of the hand layup, we've produce some flats. We have that in the system. We've got all of these flats in the system. What's the next thing that you have to do? So we just did this draping strategy for hand layup. Well, the next thing that we actually have to do is we have to go ahead and do a nesting process to run it on the-- sorry. We need to run a nesting process to drive it on the cutting machine.

And so inside the same platform, you can essentially export all those flats that we've developed and designed inside of this part-- inside the design of this part. It will export it to any format that could then drive the cutters. And at that point, you could use any solution that's on the market to produce the nest and cut it. Or built into the application itself, you could just use the nesting technology that's in there already.

And one of the things that we've done is we've recently created a forge micro surface for nesting. And this is using that forge microsurface inside this platform. If you notice this platform, by the way, all of the things I'm going to be talking about today are all built on top of Inventor. One of the things that's kind of nice about this is every piece that I'm going to be showing you, it's all coming together in the same application.

So we're going to go through some other laser projection stuff, and you'll see that. So we had generated the nest, and then we're generating the reports that get generated from that. Those reports tell us how much time it's going to take to cut that, how much material is going to be used for that. And so you're doing that all from that same process.

And as I was saying before, this is that same microsurface that we built this on. In fact, we've built some prototypes of that same microsurface working inside of Inventor as well as working inside of Fusion.

Now, the next thing that you do after you do the nesting process within this platform is you want to do the laser projection. And there too, for the laser projection, you can do this all inside of this application. And the thing about it is this-- I'm going to be talking about two different types of laser projection. One type of laser projection is what I call composite laser projection.

And the other type of laser projection is what I would call laser projection simulation, a little bit different. For instance, a lot of laser vendors on the market today will say, hey, I can take your composite part, I can project it on the laser. Not true. Not true. Why? Because they don't have the composite data model. If all they have is the plys that were built on that surface, guess what? They just have the geometry on the plys on that surface. They're not going to get the thickness updates that they need to actually offset all the plys off of that surface to the right height in the right areas.

And that's really, really important. Because, as I said, composites, especially building in aerospace parts, something that's going to be flying, if you get these plys projected in the wrong area just by a little bit, it's going to be off, and the part's going to be out of tolerance. So within this application, we're doing the laser projection for composites. We had already just generated it.

But now what we're actually doing is within the same platform, we're using something called Autodesk TruLaser. That, by the way, has been in the market for over a year now at Autodesk. We're going to take that composite laser projection, and we're going to push it into the simulation.

So what does the simulation do for us? The simulation actually gives us kind of a virtual world. It gives us this environment where we can actually see how the laser is going to perform on that particular part.

Why is that important? Because I don't want to take my part out to the shop floor and waste time on my equipment to figure out where should I position the laser so that it's in the proper location. Because then I'm not making the most out of my machine tool. I want my machine tool to do what it's supposed to do. In this case, I want it to project. I want them to use it for production. I would rather use a simulation to help me position things and to see what the performance of that part is going to look like.

So within here, what I could do with the laser simulation, you could see I could kind of go through things like I could show where the volume of the coverage of the laser is going to be. Can it cover that whole thing? Or maybe I need to make my stand a little bit higher so it can project, because these laser projectors, what you'll see if you go to the course on Thursday, it has a certain range that it can actually project to.

And what you're seeing there is that's something that we call Parallax. That's showing you how good the projection is going to be. What the laser projection is going to do, the best thing-- it's all through line of sight, because it's actually using lasers to project on any 3D surface.

And so the thing is this-- if it's projecting normal to the surface, that's perfect. That's going to show up green. But if it starts to come at a sharper angle and approach a sharper angle, it's going to turn up yellow. Now, in the red areas, that's what we call Parallax. That's where you're trying to project down, that's on something so sharp that if you're just off by a little bit, actually the light's going to fall off.

And those are the areas that you could worry about. And so what could you do to fix something like that? One, if you have an understanding that, OK, that's going to happen there, you may just deal with it in this situation. Or you may actually get two laser projections coming at different angles to give you a better presentation of that port. So once again, just through the same platform, what we're able to see is we can do both of those things. We could do the composite laser projection at the same time as we do the laser simulation.

So now we're going to talk a little bit more about laser simulation. The application and everything that we do, whether we're driving cutting machines or we're driving laser projectors, we support all different vendors. It doesn't matter who the vendor is. So if there's a laser projector on the market, we support it. These are just a couple of examples of the different vendors that are out there.

This is what a simulation environment would look like inside of a TruLaser. This is where you can actually virtually simulate what's happening on the shop floor. Where do you put your lasers? This is what they do in a clean room. This is actually what it looks like. Where do you place your tools? You could see there could be a lot of different activity going on.

As I was saying before, sometimes you actually have to use more than one laser, because on a barrel like this, because of line of sight, this laser would never have been able to reach to the other side, because the surface of that part is going to block it. And so that's one of the things that Autodesk TruLaser will do for you.

This video clip will just give you a better idea of something like that. This is a situation where we've got a big wing skin. Here, within this platform, you could use any factory asset that you have built up. You could build things like stands and projectors. You can actually even build what we call the target points.

The simulation process will actually test and make sure that the targets are located in the right location. Again, it's going to show you the proper coverage of all of this stuff. And then, of course, it's going to show us what the quality of the laser is going to look like. And again, all of this is in an effort so that you can do the manufacturing process the smart way. Do the simulation up front before you bring it down to the machine.

I see so many times that machine tools are coming out with a CAD package and some other tool on top of the machine tool. And the machine tool vendors think that's so fantastic. I look at them, and I think they're crazy. Why Would you want to put an engineer on a million-dollar piece of equipment and let that machine tool stay there for five or six hours without doing anything? That machine tool should be cutting. It should be projecting.

The engineer should be on another computer somewhere else. And so, again, these are other types of simulations that you could kind of see. Based on where the position of that laser is, you're going to see that we're going to start to get extreme Parallax in certain areas that it's not going to be able to get. And I'm just going to go through this video just a little bit faster so we don't run out of some time.

So the next thing I'm going to talk about is what we're looking for when we talk about automatic fiber placement, when we talk about what kind of simulations do we want to do? These are some of the things that happen in real life. You want to take a look at what the fiber angle is going to look like.

When you're laying down this automatic fiber, you want to see are you generating any gaps or overlaps between the material itself? Do you want to make sure that you're getting the proper compaction when you're going over a ramp or a different type of surface? That's really important, because if that material doesn't adhere to the surface, what's going to happen? You're going to get some delamination that's going to go on on that part. And it's going to be a really bad thing.

You can also experience things like wrinkling, where the material is going to fall on top of itself. And you could also run into some kind of other steering distortions that are going on. So these are some of the physical phenomena that are going to go on. And these are some of the simulations that you're going to actually see that are going to be inside of TruPlan.

And so if we kind of take a look at the next slide, we can see how TruPlan is going about building up these strategies that are going to give us the analysis of how this material works on the surface that we're putting it on, along with the machine process itself. And that's what we call design for process. That's the manufacturability. That's that manufacturability infrastructure that we've built on top of TruPlan.

And so one of the things that you'll see inside of TruPlan is it has an understanding of what that material is. And when we talk about materials, there are two different things that we actually will talk about. So inside of TruPlan, you have what's called a material catalog. That material catalog is going to tell us what the thickness of that material is and what some of the other properties are for that material so we can do the proper analysis.

But then there's something else that we call the packaging. The packaging actually tells us what's the size of that material? What's it being used for? I can have some carbon fiber, and I may be doing a fiber placement process or I could be doing a hand layup process. If it's a hand layup process, it's probably a fabric or something. And so that's how that packaging would be defined. It would be defined as a fabric. And that way I would know it's a larger size for that.

But if it was a tape, I would know that it's a tape when I chose that material. So here's where I'm actually picking the strategy that I want to go ahead and use. And after I do that strategy, I could then go ahead and do the analysis on what kind of mesh did it make? What did the fiber path actually look like? So it had generated-- just from doing the strategy, it's going to generate that fiber path for this process.

The next thing that you could do is you can actually go ahead, and you could run all the analyses on it. And there are quite a few different analyses on it. There's a gap analysis. You'll see this angular analysis, this compaction analysis, total length analysis, wrinkle analysis, and steering analysis. A bunch of different things that you can actually look at, a bunch of different phenomena that you can actually look at when you analyze this particular part.