The aim of the Clean Sky initiative is to provide radically greener air transport based on novel concepts for engines and aircraft design to meet the environmental goals for aviation in 2020, as set out by ACARE.
The area of high temperature composites is an area with huge potential for the European aeronautics industry, nonetheless, the engagement is rather limited at the moment. The replacement of metallic parts and components with CFRPs in applications with temperature requirements in excess of 200°C (currently not possible) can facilitate additional weight savings and thus further emission reductions. The advancement of processing such materials from TRL3 to TRL5 and verifying the technology on a complex shaped sub-component is suggested within the ProTHiC project.Currently tools for manufacturing composite components require a lot try-out time to fully compensate for the effects of cure induced distortion and thermal shrinkage during cooling. Handling cure induced distortion in epoxy based composite parts is still a major problem and even more challenging for composite in high temperature applications which leads to substational cost due to the excessive need for process tuning and part quality issues. The risks related to production time and cost involved with such distortions is one major barrier for manufacturers using high temperature composite parts. A reliable method for accurately predicting and controlling cure induced distortion will result in two main improvements. The first is reduction in tool development cost and risk through reduction of scrapped material, rework of tools and total tool development time. The tooling cost and risk for manufacturing high temperature composites are on the level where other material solutions are chosen instead. This addresses the ‘Flightpath 2050’ goal that “the whole European aviation industry is strongly competitive and has a share of more than 40% of its global market.” The second main improvement is reduction in design and development time through increased use of simulation and reduced need for prototype manufacture and iterative process adjustment. Nowadays the process simulation is mostly used in the late design process. Changes, which have to be made here, result in reworking and high additional costs. With the newly developed concurrent design process, the manufacturing simulation will be included in the early design phase, starting with preliminary feasibility studies. There will be a strong connection with continuous data transfer between design and process simulation, which are working in parallel. This approach will reduce development time and allows for early adjustments in the design to save costs of expensive subsequent work. This addresses the goals set forth in ‘Flightpath 2050’ regarding “streamlined systems engineering, design, manufacturing, certification and significantly reduced development costs”.
ProTHiC has objective to:
-develop, characterise and establish calibrated materials and models for high temperature resins tailored for processing with RTM,
-verify and develop a foundation for best practice in terms of tool design concept used for high temperature RTM-processing,
-show that physically sound composite processing simulation (cure and mould filling) methodologies can be used to predict properties of high temperature composites and components,
-include means to take tool-part interaction in to account in such processing simulations,
-define and verify a simulation assisted tool design process where CAD-data is efficiently transferred to the simulation software’s and tool surface compensation can be performed based on simulation outcome,
Prepare demonstrator component (including tools) to verify the materials and simulation methodologies.
