Bristol Composites Institute’s (BCI) Research Associate, Yi Wang attended the 12th Asian-Australasian Conference on Composite Materials (ACCM12) in Hangzhou, China from the 25th to the 28th of April. Yi won the Young Researcher Award for his talk entitled “An automated workflow for composites part manufacturability prediction and tooling optimisation”. Yi was presented the award by BCI’s founder and former director Professor Michael Wisnom who also attended the conference.
Yi has been a member of our process simulation team for a number of years working originally as a PhD student within the EPSRC SIMPROCS platform grant before becoming a Research Associate working on the same project. He now works on our latest EPSRC grant: Composites: Made Faster. Yi’s talk presented the outputs from our work on the research program DETI led by the National Composites Centre (NCC) and funded by the West of England Authority. This research developed, at an industrial scale, an automated workflow for the prediction of manufacturing-induced defects in autoclave-moulded thick composite parts. It builds on the robust consolidation model and homogenisation approach developed at BCI in the last 10 years.
The work also laid the foundation to conduct data-driven optimisation of caul plate geometries for reduced geometrical deviation from part design. Wide adoption of these tools could allow saving industry a considerable amount of time and money by removing a large number of the many physical trials that are currently an integral part of any composite part manufacturing process development.
Yi’s supervisors Dr Jonathan Belnoue and Professor Stephen Hallett said: “Congratulations to Yi for this achievement. Yi is a very important member of the team who brings great enthusiasm to anything he puts his hand to. A very well-deserved award! This is also great recognition of the quality of BCI process simulation work that has advanced considerably over the last 10 years”.