Automatic Virtual Metrology for Carbon Fiber Manufacturing

Carbon fiber is currently one of the most popular composite materials in the world, with its wide applications ranging from bikes to space shuttles. However, there is no comprehensive method for the total quality inspection of carbon fiber products so far due to its feature of continuous production and destructive examination of quality inspection. Through years of development, the Automatic Virtual Metrology (AVM) technology has been applied to various industries to turn the offline sampling inspection with metrology delay into online and real-time total inspection. With AVM, every workpiece of the carbon fiber products can be examined to ensure total quality inspection. The biggest issue of continuous production is that it can neither accurately define each unit nor label on the products. To solve this problem, a production data traceback (PDT) mechanism is proposed in this letter. The PDT mechanism can provide a virtual label to each unit for referring back to the process parameters of the production. With PDT, the process data of each workpiece of a complete spin can be acquired so as to accomplish the work-in-process (WIP) tracking requirement of applying AVM. Also, the Advanced Manufacturing Cloud of Things (AMCoT) platform is adopted in this letter to fulfill all the smart manufacturing requirements for achieving the goal of zero defects of carbon fiber manufacturing.