1266. Experience in Advanced Aluminum Alloy and Composite Material Applications in Aircraft Structures
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Paper
Abstract
Applications of advanced materials have the objective of improving the performance characteristics and/or the cost-efficiency of aircraft. This is achieved by significantly reducing structural weight through application of materials having greater strength or stiffness and/or reducing the processing costs and materials acquisition costs.
Advanced fibre materials with plastic matrix are the best potential candidates with respect to these objectives. Taking into consideration the cost-efficiency aspects, carbon and Kevlar fibres used individually and in combinations afford the greatest long-term prospects of replacing metallic structural materials and glass fibres. In recent years there have been world-wide intensive efforts to create the necessary conditions for the introduction of these materials, but a break-through has not yet been achieved.
Overshadowed by these efforts the aluminum industry has been able to develop new high-strength materials having significantly improved toughness, stress corrosion cracking resistance and through-hardening properties. Since aluminum alloys must still be considered as the most important structural materials in the near future, these improvements allow significant reductions of structural weight without major additional materials costs and thus improvement of the performance characteristics and cost efficiency of the aircraft.
The experience acquired by VFW-Fokker in this field is the subject of this paper.
