In the present study, the fiber-bending around the needle during the piercing process of the carbon fabric is investigated. In this regard, a mathematical model is established to investigate the bending elongation of the carbon fiber around the needle and the interaction between the carbon fiber and the needle tip. Then the mechanical behavior of the carbon fabric when moving down the tip of the steel needle is analyzed. Based on the performed analysis, a shape curve equation that satisfies the puncture needle tip is established. Furthermore, the influence of different needle tip shapes on the mechanical behavior of the carbon fiber is analyzed. The performance of the needle tip is subjected to different loads, including the puncture template, horizontal tension of the fiber to the needle tip, frictional resistance between the fiber and the needle tip, sliding force, and the bending moment. The performed analysis shows that when the shape of the needle tip assumes the form of curve 10, the downward force, horizontal tension, friction resistance, sliding force, and bending moment are minimized. Accordingly, curve 10 is proposed as the optimal shape for the needle tip. The present study is expected to provide theoretical guidance for selecting overall puncture process parameters.

Recent research has shown that, during integrated piercing, the yarn tension can displace the needles from the centers of the holes in the piercing template. To reduce the damage done to the needle tips when the needles and the hole walls collide when the needle displacement is too large, this paper proposes a method for optimizing the needle shape that satisfies the strength constraint while targeting minimum needle displacement. First, the optimal objective function and strength constraint conditions for the tip displacement of the integrated puncture needle are established, which are affected by many factors. Then, the feature selection method of machine learning is used to reduce the dimensionality of the objective function after data reduction, and the feasible region of key features is reduced to avoid falling into the local best point in the optimization iteration. Finally, machine vision is used to measure experimentally the tip displacement of a needle array. The results show that the average tip displacement is reduced by 18.1631.42 and the collision risk is reduced from 43.14 to 5.54. It shows that the optimization method of needle shape based on feature selection is effective for reducing needle tip impact damage during integrated piercing.