Machine made by aeronautic researcher's team helps nation build advanced aircraft

China's aviation engineers have put an end to the monopoly of foreign companies on a top-tier manufacturing technique that is key to building advanced aircraft, according to a senior researcher at Aviation Industry Corp of China, a State-owned defense giant.

Automated fiber placement, or AFP, is an advanced technique of manufacturing composite materials that are lightweight and of superior quality. These composite materials are as strong as other metals or alloys, and sometimes even stronger. They are increasingly used to build aircraft and other high-end products.

"In the past, if you wanted to use composite materials to construct an airframe, you would have to organize many workers to manually place one layer of nonmetallic fibers on another. A typical layer is only 0.13 millimeter thick, while some parts of an airframe are 40 mm thick. This means workers would have to place many layers and work long hours to build an airframe," said Li Zhiqiang, head of the AVIC Manufacturing Technology Institute and a national political adviser.

The manual process is not only time-consuming, but also often has problems when it is used to make a large, sophisticated structure, he said.

AVIC had tried to solve this issue by importing AFP machines, but engineers soon found that the foreign equipment was not up to their standards, and that maintaining the operating software required a lot of money and strong support from foreign specialists.

"So we decided to develop our own AFP machine, for which we have full intellectual property rights, and we were determined to use its research and development to establish our capability to deal with composite materials," the senior researcher said.

Li spoke on the sidelines of the first session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which was held in Beijing from March 4 to Saturday. He is a member of the 14th CPPCC National Committee, the nation's top political advisory body.

The AVIC institute is a major research body for advanced aeronautical manufacturing technologies, materials and equipment in China, and has played an important role in the design and production of some of the country's most powerful aircraft.

After years of hard work and creative endeavors, the efforts of Li and his fellow engineers paid off with the birth of a cutting-edge AFP robot. "This machine enables a single worker to use half a day to manufacture a certain type of component that would take six people using the traditional method a whole day," he said.

Last year, the robot started being used to build Chinese aircraft, helping workers improve production efficiency and the planes' capabilities, according to Li.

"With it (the AFP machine), we are now able to use fewer composite materials to make airframes. That saves a plane a certain amount of weight, which can be used to carry more missiles or fuel, so it has more combat power and a longer flight range," he said.