Composite materials are widely used in the aircraft industry for their outstanding strength to weigh ratio allowing to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emission. But the manufacturing process associated to these materials appears to be expensive, as one of the main current focuses of the industry is to reduce manufacturing cost. In this regard, the autoclave manufacturing processes is progressively replaced by other processes which consume less energy, produce less waste, use cheaper raw material with potentially shorter manufacturing cycle. From this tendency, the so called “out-of-autoclave” manufacturing processes are being developed to produce complex and structural part.
Conventional composite materials are made from reinforcement such as carbon fibre, and usually a thermoset matrix. The industry shows high interest to orientate the development of composite materials toward thermoplastic matrices that will help to introduce new outstanding features such as better recyclability, better reparability, easier part joining while continuing to keep the potential for weight saving. This will help for CO2 reduction and will also be very helpful in the age of more electric vehicles.
The main objective of COFRARE 2020 is to investigate the possibility to produce primary structure of aircraft through these innovative materials and processes, that are more sustainable and cost-efficient. The primary structure of an aircraft is the essential part of the body of the plane that provides the strength of the machine to resist the forces produced during a flight. The targeted components are C-frames that will be manufactured from thermoset composite materials using the so-called Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) process that allows mixing resin and carbon fiber reinforcement, out of the autoclave, and cure it to get the desired part quality. These structural component will give the circumferential strength to the fuselage barrel throughout mating parts which are the so-called Shear Ties. These components will be manufactured from thermoplastic composite materials using the so-called thermoforming process.
Therefore, the aim of COFRARE 2020 project is to develop a full-scale fuselage barrel out of composite thermoset C-frame manufactured by out of autoclave processes and composite thermoplastic shear ties, being materials and processes more affordable and sustainable than the previous ones.
