Abstract: By contrasting the conventional hot gas heating and consulting relevant literature, this paper proposes the application of infrared heating to replace hot gas heating in an automatic tape laying machine. It employs feedforward control, establishes a relevant control strategy and constructs an automatic infrared heating thermostatic control system. This system is in accordance with the established infrared heating mathematical model under steady state and makes use of the hardware structure of the automatic tape laying machine. It takes speed as the variable and temperature as the variable to be controlled, and uses a programmable logic controller (PLC) as the cybernetic core. The experiment resuts show that the automatic infrared heating thermostatic control system can make composite components with smooth surfaces, little or no buckling, and only a low amount of gaps or bubbles between different prepreg layers. The tape stickiness insures that the prepreg does not bond with the backing paper and no slippage occurs. Thus, this system can satisfy the requirements of automatic thermostatic control under high and variable speed situations.

Key words: automatic tape laying, feedforword control, programmable logic controller, infrared heating, temperature control