Date of Award

5-6-2024

Degree Type

Capstone Project

First Advisor

Bahram Nassersharif

Abstract

This report is the work of the University of Rhode Island Mechanical Engineering Capstone Team 23 for the 2023 to 2024 Academic Year. This project is sponsored by Concordia Engineered Fibers with the purpose of designing a system to control tension in order to solve the problem of catenary while combining four plys of 3K commingled composite fiber into one end. Catenary is the uneven tension and lengths of plys within a combined bundle.

The design process began with literature and patent searches to find existing research and designs that are relevant to the problem of catenary and plying four ends of fiber together. From these searches the team was able to find resources that reveal the processes currently used in the textile industry as well as the theoretical background for problems surrounding textile manufacturing as they relate to our objective. From there the team produced 120 concepts and through multiple Pugh analysis done both individually and as a group they were narrowed down to four concepts that would be designed and manufactured inorder to be tested. Design specifications were produced using our customer requirements giving a set of parameters to design around.

The first concept we developed for our proof of concept was a grooved serpentine roller. This concept was designed inorder to separate the ends as they come off of the bobbins and allow them to lay flat and in parallel without giving them the opportunity to cross over each other, producing uneven length. For the entire winding system, a cart with a capstan and powered rollers was fitted with a frame that allows the grooved rollers to be attached in an adjustable configuration. This system when paired with a bobbin rack and take up winder could produce packages by combining four ends into one.

Over the course of the year, the team ran 39 trials, changing various parts of the system inorder to test the effects of various components on the final catenary in the system. The components tested include the effect of fiber twisting, fiber geometry, fiber stiffness, bobbin pretension, and various roller geometries and configurations in the winder. From these tests we found that fiber shape and twisting were the most impactful influences of catenary on 4-ply winding. These findings guided our design of a grooved roller guide, to prevent the fibers from meeting until the bobbin, in order to eliminate twisting and overlap. This design proved ineffective as the final bobbin was incompatible with the process for molding the fiber into a final part.

In the end, the final design includes our grooved roller concept, with grooved rollers at every roller until the bullet rollers that guide the four plys of fiber onto the final package. This process eliminates twisting and overlap until the final moment when the fibers are on the bobbin.

Comments

Team Name: Nary Catenary (Team 23)

Company Sponsor: Concordia Engineered Fibers, LLC

Sponsor Representative: Sean Reymond, Kevin Leandro, Jody Ward

Document Reference: URI-MCE-402-23-2024

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