Interpreting process data of wet pressing process. Part 1: Theoretical approach

The wet pressing process represents a new production method for carbon fibre-reinforced plastics components. Due to the low cycle times, it is suitable for use in the automotive industry. Therefore, a sufficient degree of industrialisation needs to be achieved, which is characterised by a stable process. The knowledge about relevant process parameters, their interactions, and influence on the part quality builds the basis of an economic process. This is a major challenge, since in the early stage of process development the available amount of recorded process data is small and the data sets are not complete. As the implementation of time-, material-, and cost-intensive experiments represents no acceptable alternative, a theoretical approach is chosen. This article describes a theoretical procedure to define the critical factors of the wet pressing process with significantly less resource input.