Functional Coatings for Fiber Fabrics and Prepreg Manufacturing for Composites and Structures with Tailored Textile Engineering

Based on standard thermal spray technologies (APS and arc wire) different coating processes has been developed and modified for applying hard materials like ceramics and cermets or light metal alloys on different textile fiber substrates. The coatings are mainly required as stab protection, fire protection or as matrix material on prepregs for metal matrix composites. For these applications the challenges are reducing thermal load on the temperature sensitive fibers, to retain the flexibility or the defined shape of a fiber structure during coating process. Therefore coatings are deposited with intensive simultaneous substrate cooling and adapted robot trajectories or by simultaneous winding and coating. For manufacturing fiber prepregs additional features in textile engineering have to be considered. The orientation of the fiber reinforcement has a significant influence on the mechanical properties of the composite. Hence the fiber orientation has to be customized to even complex three-dimensional reinforcements during the coating process.