Useage of Dry Fiber Placement Fiber Semifinished Products for the Production of Board Sports Equipment Using the Example of a Splitboard

Abstract

In the state of the art, sandwich structures are predominantly used for the production of board sports equipment such as snowboards, skateboards and wakeboards, which usually consist of a wood core with cover layers of fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP). These almost exclusively thermoset FRP in the top and bottom booms are mainly manufactured by means of hand lay-up processes and subsequent hot pressing and joined in situ to the wood core. In the state of the art, multiaxial knitted fabrics with a fiber orientation of 0/90 or 0/+45/-45 are often used as semi-finished fiber products. These semi-finished fiber products manufactured on classic textile lines have a width of several inches after production. The most common width is 1.27 m or 50 inches, which leads to a very high waste of up to 30 % in production. By using the dry fiber placement process to manufacture preforms for a so-called splitboard, which is a subgroup of snowboards, it was possible to reduce the waste of carbon fibers during the fiber semifinished product production by approx. 60 % and significantly increase the economic efficiency.  In addition, the variable tape placement of the dry fiber placement technology makes it possible to produce complex layer structures automatically, which can currently only be produced manually.