In the past years priorities with regard to the manufacture of aerospace structures have changed significantly. Cost savings have become more and more important relative to weight reduction. Hence, state-of-the-art composite manufacturing processes are regarded as being no longer cost-efficient enough. Some reasons for the high costs of FRP aircraft components are expensive materials (prepregs) and slow and labour-intensive manufacturing processes. In addition, extensive quality assurance processes have to be performed.
An approach to partly overcome these disadvantages is the use of textile techniques allowing the processing of dry fibres to near-net-shape preforms additionally offering the possibility of a three dimensional fibre architecture. Essentially, automatic manufacturing processes derived from the garment industry are modified to allow the processing of high-performance fibres.
