Aerospace & Defense Technology - June 2021 - 10

Military Aerospace Technology
GLARE® in Upper
Fuselage
Advanced cabin
materials
CFRP Floor Beams
for Upper Deck
High performance
cutting
New Al-alloys
CFRP J-Nose
KBE design
CFRP Outer Flaps
CFRP Vertical
Tail Plane
CFRP Horizontal
Tail Plane
LBW, Lower Fuselage
CFRP
Electron Beam Welding
Section 19.1
CFRP center wing box
More & New Ti-material
CFRP
Wing Ribs
CFRP Rear Pressure
Bulkhead
CFRP
Section 19
Figure 6. As seen above, composite materials of various types make up approximately 50 percent of modern aircraft structures. (Image courtesy of Airbus)
sistance as well as strong thermal behavior.
All-in-all, there is a wide selection
of materials and structural strategies
that are being deployed within
aerospace to custom match material behavior
to application goal.
Hybrid composite materials, for instance,
are under considerable study in
aerospace to help advance performance
within the larger goal of lightweighting.
Although their design and production
method may at times be similar to traditional
layup structures and curing approaches,
they can be composed of inorganic
nano/micro materials and
particulates, along with organic substances
such as flax, hemp and cotton
fibers. The pressure is on with organic
fibers to improve the environmental viability
of composites. Recycled polymers
can be reinforced with natural
fibers to both improve material behavior
and reduce their carbon footprint,
research shows.
10
Cov
Glass Laminate Aluminum Reinforced
Epoxy (GLARE), a material found
in the outer shell of the Airbus A380, is
certainly a hybrid success story. After
considerable research and iteration, the
company, among others, proved that it
is possible to skillfully combine very different
individual materials to achieve
high-strength and stiffness at low density
while also suppressing potential
crack growth.
Such applications reinforce the need
for 3D-scanning, visualization, and data
analysis to understand if combinations
of materials were distributed appropriately
and perform as intended. Researchers
need ongoing information
about the reinforcement distributions
and orientations involved and how to
control manufacturing outcomes.
With past successes in hand and competitive
challenges ahead, universities
and industry R&D labs are exploring
new and existing material combinawww.aerodefensetech.com
ToC
tions
to address specific, desired performance
envelopes. Of course, each
new material and microstructure combination
brings new mechanical behaviors.
These conditions must be well understood
early-on in the R&D space.
R&D and Production Inspection
R&D and prototype production is
where CT analysis first helps quantify
performance and yield, defect types and
rates, and quality-inspection states related
to both design instances and variations
that may occur in manufacturing.
Because of inner part complexity
and increasing economic emphasis on
automation and production output, understanding
what happens in the
Process Event, as well as in design, is
particularly important to composites.
Porosity, delamination, and cracking, to
name a few conditions, are some of the
problems that can result from process
settings and their innate variables-not
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Aerospace & Defense Technology - June 2021

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