Processing of aerospace composites

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PROCESSING OF AEROSPACE COMPOSITES Composite materials are increasingly being used in commercial aircraft, e.g. the Boeing 787, Airbus 380, and Airbus 350, and Canadian companies are producing a significant amount of theses structures. The key to making cost-competitive composite aircraft structures is efficient manufacturing. To achieve this, process design and development has to be supported by science-based process analysis and modelling to reduce cost and risk. By simulating the manufacturing process using computers, the number of time-consuming and costly manufacturing trials required to get the process right can be reduced dramatically. Composites process modelling is starting to being used by several larger aircraft companies in developing new processes. However, there are several areas where our understanding needs to be improved to enable faster and more reliable simulations, and to make this promising technology more widely adopted. This proposal is aimed at two of those areas: 1) "Constitutive behaviour of curing composites"; and 2) "Core crush of honeycomb panels". Both projects involve larger experimental studies to first determine the underlying fundamental science behind the respective problems. With the fundamentals better understood, mathematical models that quantifies the observed behaviour can be developed, and incorporated in a larger simulation framework. The outcome will be increased understanding of the fundamental science of composites processing as well as faster and more reliable simulations of composites processes, which can have a big impact on the competitiveness of Canadian composites manufacturers.