Design of a prototype device for filament winding of pressure vessels

Introduction The final purpose of the machine design is to develop devices in order to satisfy the necessities of the customers by applying the principles of physics to structures and machines respecting the economical bounds. The quality products match and overcome the customer expectations: the most the expectations are satisfied, the high the quality is. Thus the continuous improvement of the devices is a must. Here the application of the machine design supplies the request of quality improvement for an existing machine. Along these years the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering worked out a research plan about the energy saving theme and nowadays its interest gets renewed. The research applies to energy saving in large vehicles and the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering aims to increase the overall performances of the experimental set. While the future step would be the adjustment of the whole equipment inside a truck or a bus for public transportation, the current one would increase the capabilities of the experimental set. The pressure vessels of the test machine were identified as the bottlenecks of the system because of their low pressure strength and their heavy weight. The investigations are actually limited at 350 bar pressure and the desired utmost pressure is 500 bar. Furthermore the pressure vessels are steel made, thus a change to carbon fibre pressure vessels allows an (estimated) 50% weight saving. Such a chance drove the research fellows to would adopt the carbon fibre pressure vessels into the experimental set. Previous works[1] by the Production branch of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering applied to the FW technology, focusing on glass fibre filament winding of elbows. Being the filament winding the in-use technology for reinforced fibre pressure vessels making, it was decided to make the pressure vessels inside the Dept. While FEM modelling is going on, time reasons and available materials let the researcher fellows decide to make the machine inside the Dept. as well. Such a solution needed a teamwork to operate and an other one together with fellows coming from Energy branch, Structural branch, Production branch and final year students was set. This study proposes the design of a prototype machine for filament winding to supply the improvements needed for the existing test set about energy saving researches. Some preliminary evaluations led the Team to buy several devices to compose the prototype. These devices need to be suited and to assemble altogether while the lacking parts need to be engineered. Once I have got into the Team, my work has focused onto engineering the lacking parts and harmonizing the devices and the components to set the prototype up. 2