Project description
Low-energy manufacturing processes for high-performance composite aircraft fuselages
Europe is accelerating innovation in aerospace manufacturing and engineering to meet its ambitious targets to reduce the aerospace sector’s carbon footprint. The fuselage is the aircraft’s largest subcomponent, and enhancing its production using advanced, lightweight and high-performance carbon fibre-reinforced plastics (CFRP) will play an important role. The EU-funded COFRARE 2020 project is answering this need with a focus on promising liquid resin transfer moulding and thermoplastics compression moulding processes. The team plans to deliver a CFRP frame and shear tie manufacturing process for a regional aircraft fuselage barrel demonstrated at full-scale. Economic analyses and environmental impact studies in real productive conditions will be included.
Objective
The main approach to achieve the proposed targets will be to focus on innovative concepts and manufacturing technologies such as liquid resin transfer molding (RTM) and thermoplastics compression molding processes.
In this sense there have been a lot of researches carried out in recent years and still nowadays on-going are proving the technical feasibility of resin transfer molding and thermoplastic material-based processes to manufacture structural aeronautical components, but they need to be up-scaled at industrial level, upon checking the technical, economic and environmental impact in real productive conditions.
One step forward, specific for frames for regional aircraft COFRARE 2.0 in the project several studies are being carried out
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CS2-IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
08290 Cerdanyola Del Valles (Barcelona)
Spain