Challenges and Opportunities for Future Aircrafts made of CFRP

Abstract

Reduction of structural weight of primary constructions in aerospace is an important contribution to decrease development and operating costs. Lower structural weight has also an impact on reduced fuel consumption and therefore also a positive effect on the environment. The use of structures made of CFRP is one promising possibility to reach this goal. By purposeful combination, arrangement and design of the individual components – fibre and matrix – directionality of the material characteristics can be constructed and used in a way which is suitable for the respective application. Furthermore CFRP is characterized by good damping behaviour and by a high specific energy absorption capacity. These additional “degrees of freedom“ lead to a completely new development potential, but also require a more complex and new type of design philosophy as well as inter-disciplinary know-ledge ranging from the design to the production of fibre composite structures. The use of CFRP for primary aerospace structures is already accepted. The part of that material on the whole aircraft structure is continuously increasing. Boeing developed recently the Dreamliner 787 which contains about 50% of CFRP. Airbus is currently designing the Airbus A350, which will contain a similar part of composites. Although, this is a significant step in the aerospace technology, this first airplane generation does not use the full potential of the composite structures. The reason is that there is still a need for research in different areas as stability, effects of defects, structural health monitoring or automation of the manufacturing process. Thus, for the future there are possibilities and challenges in further weight reduction as well in bringing more functionality into the structure. This paper gives to two examples a short overview about the state-of-the-art and demon-strates an outlook in the future design. Example 1 presents results and future activities in the field of stability of composite light weight structures. For such structures as used in aerospace main results of the EU project COCOMAT (Improved MATerial Exploitation at Safe Design of COmposite Airframe Structures by Accurate Simulation of COllapse) and the challenges for the future is given. Example 2 demonstrates the potential and challenges of the TFP technology (Tailored Fibre Placement) which allows a significant weight reduction for composite structures. For the final industrial implementation there are still some challenges which have to be solved.