Aerodynamic fiber deposition: additive manufacturing continuous fiber reinforcement with patternable alignment

Abstract

Fiber-reinforced composites (FRC) are high-performance materials whose manufacture is constrained by the difficulty of arranging continuous fibers into complex, spatially varying orientations. This work reports aerodynamic fiber deposition (AFD), a new additive manufacturing technique that uses electrospinning to generate continuous airborne nano/microfibers and a tangent airflow to align them on a conductive target. An insulating mask on the target can localize the aligned deposition and produce fibrous layers with patternable fiber orientation by scanning the localized deposition window over the target. The deposited polymer fibers can then be pyrolyzed into inorganic fibers, which can be infiltrated with resin to produce high-performance FRC.