Stress-Driven Generation of Continuous Fibrous Material Paths for Additive Manufacturing: Numerical Assessment and Manufacturing Feasibility

This work presents a methodology for the generation of continuous fibre trajectories based on principal stress directions in continuous fibre-reinforced additive manufacturing (CFAM). The material system considered consists of continuous carbon fibre (CCF-1.5K) embedded in a CFC-PA thermoplastic matrix. CFAM enables the deposition of fibres along tailored paths, allowing improved alignment with the load direction, compared to traditional composite manufacturing. In this way, the strong anisotropy of composite materials, typically considered a limitation, is exploited as a design opportunity by aligning fibres with the structural load paths. The proposed approach combines finite element analysis with a path generation procedure, including the computation of principal stress directions, the extraction of streamlines of the principal stress field, and a dedicated post-processing stage aimed at obtaining continuous and manufacturable fibre layouts. The effectiveness of the method is assessed through a finite element-based comparison with conventional fibre configurations, showing an increase in global stiffness of approximately 20% with respect to the best-performing unidirectional layout. In addition, the feasibility of the generated trajectories is demonstrated through printing tests performed on a continuous fibre additive manufacturing system. The results confirm that the proposed methodology enables the generation of physically realizable fibre paths while improving structural performance.