Metal may have a new entry in the battle for super lightweight aircraft skins. General Electric received a U.S. patent June 17 for a powder metal sheet composition that could compete with plastic composites, such as those used in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner or new Airbus wide-bodied aircraft. The GE sheet is made from a nickel-base superalloy having more than about 30 percent by volume of gamma prime phase, or an intermetallic such as a titanium aluminide. A GE spokesperson commented to Design News: “We have no plans at this time to introduce this into any product, but it offers GE the interesting option to use this for high temperature sheet material.”
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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