Cevotec now offers tapes for AFP/ATL

Cevotec’s (Taufkirchen bei München, Germany) carbon fiber tape for automated placement processes is now commercially available. Individually manufactured and tailored to major automated fiber placement processes, cevoTape offers a
new option for series production at reasonable economics.

“Automated fiber placement processes require superior tape quality to minimize downtime and ensure high precision and repeatability,” explains Felix Michl, CTO of Cevotec. As the right fiber is crucial for the quality of a composite part, Cevotec developed cevoTape, a dry-fiber spread tow tape made from high-quality carbon fiber rovings, bindered with a copolyamide adhesive.

“With cevoTape we offer an alternative to expensive aeronautic-certified tapes,” notesThorsten Groene, managing director of Cevotec. “It is suited for non-aeronautic applications, e.g. the automotive industry. We’ve already received solid interest from manufacturers of AFP/ATL equipment who are looking for tape material for their customers. Initial tests of cevoTape with their robotic layup heads were performed successfully.”

Cevotec processes its own unidirectional carbon fiber spread tow tape in the SAMBA Series Fiber Patch Placement systems. But cevoTape also matches the requirements of other automated fiber placement processes like AFP and ATL to create high-quality laminates, and can be used for a variety of different applications. cevoTape has a customized width within minimal tolerances and thanks to an integrated quality monitoring, it features a homogeneous filament distribution. The single-sided, uniformly distributed PA-Binder (Spunfab: PA1541, PA1300, further materials on request) is activated at temperatures from 90º-160°C. Thus, cevoTape can be easily fixed during processing, and stored at room temperature.

“Customers may approach us with roving material of their choice and have us manufacture their individual tape,” says Michl. “We process any high-quality fiber.” Alternatively, there are pre-configured tapes using Toho Tenax Europe GmbH’s (Wuppertal, Germany) Tenax-E HTS45 fibers in stock, featuring 20 or 30 mm width and 80–107 gsm areal weight, separated with paper film, stored on Häfner spools (250m, custom lengths on request).

Besides compatibility with the SAMBA Series manufacturing systems, Cevotec guarantees highest quality for all major placement processes as well as the dimensional tolerance of the tape that allows manufacturers to attain the high placement and operating precision they desire: “Such a tape quality achieves outstanding results in production processes and allows the economic application of AFP / ATL processes in non-aeronautic applications,” concludes
Michl.