Even though providing excellent specific stiffness and strength properties, high specific energy absorption and a great degree of design freedom, fibre-reinforced plastics still have to make their way into higher volume applications. Addressing the manufacturing challenges, particularly efficient production techniques are Automated Tape Laying (ATL) and Automated Fiber Placement (AFP), as pointed out by various studies and use cases. However, current Computer Aided Engineering approaches for optimised laminate design still lack the capability to produce results suitable for ATL/AFP. A new method for deriving tape courses from any finite element laminate optimisation result is presented and applied to a virtual demonstrator. An outlook is given on further necessities of extending current laminate optimisation approaches.

Lightweight Design as an engineering domain is becoming more and more important in terms of sustainable mobility. Therefore, a large number of researchers is developing methods for utilisation of modern, but as well more complex materials with high lightweight potential. One subgroup of these materials are fibre-reinforced plastics (FRP). A lot of work is done supporting the design engineer in exploiting the structural and mechanical behaviour as good as possible. Whereas variations of laminate parameters, resulting from production, are poorly studied. Their impact especially on defined measures under load is of high importance, e.g. having a look on clearances in automotive industry. Because of the high complexity of FRP-parts, resulting from many laminate parameters, tolerancing is not an intuitive process. This is reflected in the fact that there is no defined procedure for tolerancing of FRP- parts. To support the design engineer the authors perform sensitivity analysis for simple loadcases to identify layers with a high importance on a defined measure. The results then are generalised to provide general guidelines to the design engineer.