Like engineers in other transportation industries, commercial aircraft designers are racing to create lighter weight, less costly components while maintaining structural integrity. New materials for manufacturing structural and non-structural components are being developed for interior and exterior applications. These include lighter, stronger, and faster-curing carbon fiber and glass composites, and lighter weight metals and alloys. For interiors, new constructions contain microcellular or honeycomb cores or glass bubbles.
Although composites, especially carbon fiber-based, receive a lot of attention, most structural materials in commercial aircraft are still metals, primarily aluminum and its alloys. According to a new study of lightweighting materials in transportation, in many cases, aluminum is the best material for the short term, since it doesn't disrupt manufacturing patterns. The Lux Research report, "Structural Navigation: Optimizing Materials Selection in Automotive and Aerospace," contains multiple decision-tree analyses. These help determine which materials are best used where in several transportation applications, now and during the next 10 years.
Components made of microcellular polyurethane elastomers, such as this jounce bumper or spring aid made of BASF's Cellasto, can reduce weight, absorb shock, and dampen sound and vibration in aircraft interiors. (Source: BASF)
In the last five to seven years the aerospace industry has learned that carbon fiber doesn't make sense for every application, said Tony Morales, Alcoa's global marketing director for aerospace and defense rolled products:
From the design and build standpoint, aluminum has high performance and low weight at a lower cost than the alternatives. It doesn't require building new factories, new hangars, new supply chains, new ovens, or doing R&D for new inspection and repair techniques. In metal wing structures, you only have mass where it's needed. In carbon fiber it's harder to fine-tune complex shapes.
Alcoa is working with aircraft OEMs on new structural approaches that combine selective reinforcement techniques and advanced structural concepts with new materials.
Its third-generation aluminum-lithium alloys, introduced last year, have higher strength-to-weight ratios and better stiffness and corrosion resistance. Their densities range from 2 percent to 10 percent lower than traditional aluminum, depending on the amount of lithium. Most of the new generation is around 5 percent lower density. They are being used in extrusions, forgings, and sheet and plate applications in several aircraft structures, including airplane wings and fuselage. Alcoa expects to reach full production by the end of 2012 in two facilities, and by the end of 2014 in its Lafayette, Ind. facility.
Composite makers are also involved in major efforts to improve their materials as competition with aluminum alloys heats up. The main areas of development include improving strength and toughness, adapting component shapes to specific loads or environmental conditions, and reducing costs by finding better processing methods to speed up laydown rates, said Carmelo Lo Faro, Cytec's vice president of technology.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that composites are not the be all and end all of advanced structures. Aluminum has served the aircraft industries well and is (relatively speaking) a fail-safe material...dings, dents and cracks are all fixable in aluminum....dings in composites you don't know about until you've got 12 feet of delamination flapping in the breeze. Dents require trepanning the damage out of the composite and rebuilding the location. Things like leading edges in composites are fine until you have a bird strike then it's easier to replace the whole leading edge. A bird strike on an aluminum leading edge is field fixable by any competent sheet metal basher...most get you home fixes are good enough for a number of flights since the pilot will be able to view the fix and make a decision on whether to fly. Try making the same decision on a composite fix and you don't know whether its good bad or indifferent. Alcoa et al are not going to go out of business because the new fad is composites...in fact they've still got a lot up their sleeves....variations in ARALL and GLARE are just two of the aluminum/composite hybrids that'll run circles around pure composites
One of the major reasons William Boeing chose Seattle to build his airplane factory was the ready availability of spruce (particularly Sitka spruce aka "Aircraft Spruce").
BASF's website at the link Susan gives below has a clickable overall diagram of the numerous types of plastics and other materials for an airplane manufactured by the company. While high-level, I found this info helpful in my background research. Clicking on any of the categories leads to a different diagram giving more detail. For example, the high-level diagram on the structural materials page
http://www.aerospace.basf.com/structural-materials/
gives an idea of where different types of composites, thermoplastics, PIM and polyurethane materials might be used in an aircraft.
I see this technology as being useful in the manufacture of jackscrews, ths component that is often used to actuate control surfaces. If it was constructed of a lightweight plastic with a low coefficent of friction, this would be less inertia needed to move the jackscrew (energy saving for the drive motor) and could possibly lessen the need for lubrication substances. Remember the Alaska Airlines DC-9 that crashed due to failure of the jackscrew from inadequate/wrong tytpe of grease?
sometimes new ideas generate new discovweries, consider a study of all species of bird feathers and the incredible design weight, lift, etc etc, flexible wings to use both mechanical power and atmospheric changes , perhaps the ultra lights culd take on a new perspective> my wing collection has some very old feathers that have not changed over time as I keep studing these designs which are incredible' I think there is legislation forbading feather collections, but I have a deep native american background, the race card and holocaust is not in my deck. My spirit remembers the genocide of americas 20,000 tribes, and the role buffalo soldiers played when freed. I worked for a time at LTV Aerospace in the 60's on the A-7 series, while no bird is powered with fuel they can indeed do some pretty tricky stunts, like gliding for hours, with small wing shifts , in acord with atmospheric variables, fins do compensate to keep on course, but consideration of actual feathers may be in our future. whatever. Birds of prey do reach considerable speed, without any fuel at all,
How totaly novel and unprecedented, building an airplane out of light strong fibrous composites. Ideas like that don't grow on trees. Wait---Or did they?
Maybe there's a reason why Boeing located its first factory in Washington State.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
3 
