Abstract: Software is very popular in composite design and manufacturing field, which could increase efficiency and reduce costs. During design and layup process, software needs a lot of material property parameters. Most of them can be obtained from suppliers, but warning angle and limit angle are not provided by suppliers. They are usually set according to engineering experience, which are not accurate. The two values are important to predict producibility with software during the design and manufacturing process. This paper is aimed to find an approach to measure the values of warning angle and limit angle of composite lamina. A novel approach of flat model was developed to measure the warning angle and limit angle as the initial values, and then the values were corrected by spare model. After several iterations, warning angle is 9.8° and limit angle is 19.6°, which are the best results for the material. A practical layup on pylon model was conducted to verify the warning angle and limit angle values. The results show that the practical deformation is close to the simulation, which indicates that the measurement method of the warning angle and the limit angle is reliable. In conclusion, the method could solve the layup problems during composite processing, and can be a guidance for layup simulation and laminate design.

Key words: composite, limit angle, warning angle, producibility