Filament Winding Machine

A filament winding machine manufactures hollow composite structures, most often cylinders such as pressure vessels and tanks, by winding continuous reinforcing filament under tension around a rotating mandrel, impregnating the filament with resin as it is wound, curing the resin once winding is complete, and then removing the mandrel to leave a hollow finished part. One early continuous approach, called the Drostholm Process, wound material onto an endless band mandrel to produce pipe, though the source consulted for this entry gives no date or inventor for that process or for the origin of filament winding generally. More recently, the French company MF Tech and the Dutch company TANIQ began applying industrial robots to filament winding around 2005 to 2007, a significant step in automating what had previously been a more manual or semi-automated process.