Porcher Industries, which makes textiles and thermoplastic composites, says that it has provided materials to Stelia Aerospace for a research project to develop a full-scale thermoplastic fuselage demonstration.
The demonstration makes it possible to internally evaluate the use of high performance thermoplastics, as opposed to thermosets, in a next generation single aisle aircraft. The demonstrator featured all the typical characteristics of a primary fuselage airframe including thin skin, lightning protection, stringers and frames, to allow a detailed evaluation of these technologies in an industrial environment.
Stelia Aerospace made the demonstrator skin using automatic fiber placement (AFP) with thermoplastic slit carbon tapes and lightning strike protection and out of autoclave (OOA) consolidation.
STELIA Aerospace has selected leading French suppliers in thermoplastic composites to provide complementary technology packages such as: dynamic robotic induction welding of TP stringers, fast stamping of stringers and frames and hybrid TP structures by over-molding short fiber and long fiber.
For the project, Porcher developed an organosheet from its Pipreg thermoplastic range for the frames, while Porcher Pipreg laminates were used by Stelia Aerospace to produce all composite frames in the demonstrator module, as well as being incorporated into an overmoulded access door component.
This story is reprinted from material from Porcher, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
