SOLVAY SA Alongside confronting near term challenges, the aerospace industry will remain focused on addressing long-term opportunities such as ensuring efficient aircraft production.
With that in mind, a new material developed by
Airplanes need to get lighter. The aerospace industry is in search of any smart solution that can help it construct aircraft that consume less fuel and therefore emit less CO2 in order to reduce its direct contribution to air transport's carbon footprint - currently 2% of global emissions. The most readily accessible of those solutions is to make planes out of composite materials instead of metal, a direction manufacturers have been following for years, progressively replacing more and more metal parts with carbon fiber. In fact, certain commercial aircraft flying today nearly reach a proportion of 50% of composites.
But things are moving slowly. Technical considerations that boil down to time and money are (as always) to blame here: composite materials come with a certain price, and making parts with them is a slow process. Therefore, there is no other way to accelerate the path towards lighter, less polluting aircraft than to come up with new generations of composites that are fast and easy to work with.
The quickest composite materials around
That's exactly what
So what's so special about it The main thing is the curing time it allows. Making a part with carbon fiber pre-impregnated with resin traditionally takes hours because of the required autoclave curing time. In layman's terms: you have to cook it in the oven for a long time. CYCOM EP2750 reduces this time so significantly that manufacturing rates can be multiplied by a factor of 10 to 20.
This is also made possible by the product's compatibility with the fastest processing technologies currently available for making composite parts: double diaphragm forming (DDF) and spring frame press fabrication. Robots can handle these parts easily, which, combined with the resin's fast-curing properties, reduces cycle time from 8.5 hours to 30 minutes. And that's only the beginning of the virtuous cycle: as parts are made faster, asset utilization is lower and throughput is higher; also, hot compression molding is more cost effective than autoclave manufacture, especially for smaller parts. Put together, these factors decisively reduce the overall cost per part, thereby making composites competitive with the traditionally employed machined aluminum. Mind you, this is only valid for small to medium parts, but in conformity with aerospace standards for performance and quality, which means they can be used for primary as well as secondary structure, and complex geometries aren't a problem either.
Alongside confronting near term challenges, the aerospace industry will remain focused on addressing long-term opportunities such as ensuring efficient aircraft production. With that in mind, a new material developed by
Airplanes need to get lighter. The aerospace industry is in search of any smart solution that can help it construct aircraft that consume less fuel and therefore emit less CO2 in order to reduce its direct contribution to air transport's carbon footprint - currently 2% of global emissions. The most readily accessible of those solutions is to make planes out of composite materials instead of metal, a direction manufacturers have been following for years, progressively replacing more and more metal parts with carbon fiber. In fact, certain commercial aircraft flying today nearly reach a proportion of 50% of composites.
But things are moving slowly. Technical considerations that boil down to time and money are (as always) to blame here: composite materials come with a certain price, and making parts with them is a slow process. Therefore, there is no other way to accelerate the path towards lighter, less polluting aircraft than to come up with new generations of composites that are fast and easy to work with.
The quickest composite materials around
That's exactly what
So what's so special about it The main thing is the curing time it allows. Making a part with carbon fiber pre-impregnated with resin traditionally takes hours because of the required autoclave curing time. In layman's terms: you have to cook it in the oven for a long time. CYCOM EP2750 reduces this time so significantly that manufacturing rates can be multiplied by a factor of 10 to 20.
This is also made possible by the product's compatibility with the fastest processing technologies currently available for making composite parts: double diaphragm forming (DDF) and spring frame press fabrication. Robots can handle these parts easily, which, combined with the resin's fast-curing properties, reduces cycle time from 8.5 hours to 30 minutes. And that's only the beginning of the virtuous cycle: as parts are made faster, asset utilization is lower and throughput is higher; also, hot compression molding is more cost effective than autoclave manufacture, especially for smaller parts. Put together, these factors decisively reduce the overall cost per part, thereby making composites competitive with the traditionally employed machined aluminum. Mind you, this is only valid for small to medium parts, but in conformity with aerospace standards for performance and quality, which means they can be used for primary as well as secondary structure, and complex geometries aren't a problem either.
Discover Double Diaphragm Forming (DDF)
In addition to the commercial jets we're familiar with, CYCOM EP2750 targets all other areas of the aerospace industry requiring high-rate manufacturing of high numbers of parts, namely military aircraft, autonomous air vehicles such as drones - a rapidly expanding market - as well as the emerging field of urban air-taxis; for these vertical lift vehicles, high performance lightweight composites are definitely of interest.
In all these markets, current composite technologies are just too slow to keep up with rising manufacturing rates. This new material provides not only the necessary rapid manufacturing, but also the cost efficiency they seek in order to be competitive.
A partnership for lightweighting
The development of CYCOM EP2750 is the result of a strong partnership between
So far, over 300 parts with five different designs have been made in a simulated production environment, thus demonstrating the short cycle times and high performance can effectively be attained. The two companies split the work:
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