Thermoplastic Fuselage Demonstrator

October 1, 2017

Porcher Industries
Badinières, France
+33 (0)4 74 43 10 10
www.porcher-ind.com

Porcher Industries, a company that specializes in technical textiles and thermoplastic composite solutions, announced that they supported STELIA Aerospace during that company's recent “ARCHES BOX TP” research project.

STELIA Aerospace has developed a full-scale thermoplastic fuselage demonstrator to allow an internal evaluation of the use of high performance thermoplastics - as opposed to thermosets - within a next generation single aisle aircraft. The demonstrator featured all the typical characteristics of a primary fuselage airframe such as thin skin, lightning protection, stringers and frames, to allow a detailed evaluation of these technologies in a true industrial environment.

STELIA Aerospace has invested millions of dollars in their ARCHES BOX TP Research & Technology project (2015-2017) within the CORAC (French Strategic Advisory Board for Civil Aviation Research) platform. The project is both a technological challenge, thanks to the much lower level of maturity of thermoplastics compared to thermoset matrix composite, and an economic issue, because its global application for the fuselage of the single aisle aircraft (with demanding Low Cost - High Rate requirements) must be more cost competitive than the previous generation of metallic technologies.

As both the project owner and design authority, STELIA Aerospace manufactured the demonstrator skin with Automatic Fiber Placement (AFP - using thermoplastic slit carbon tapes and lightning strike protection) and Out of Autoclave (OOA) consolidation, before completing the final structure assembly at its in-house R & T center, STELIALAB in Meaulte, France. STELIA Aerospace has selected leading French suppliers in thermoplastic composites to provide complementary technology packages such as: dynamic robotic induction welding of TP stringers, fast stamping of stringers and frames and hybrid TP structures by over molding short fiber and long fiber.

For the ARCHES BOX TP project, Porcher's Industries technical team developed an organosheet from the Pipreg^® range of thermoplastic solutions as the optimal material for the frames, based on the initial Stelia Aerospace specification. The PEKK based Pipreg^® laminates use a specific carbon reinforcement, providing an exceptional combination of mechanical and fatigue properties from cryogenic to very high temperatures. Thanks to a cutting-edge and disruptive development involving mixing chemistry and processing, Porcher Industries was able to develop an improved and unique interface between fibers and PEKK.

Porcher Pipreg^® laminates satisfied all of the testing, engineering and processing targets for the ARCHES BOX TP project and were used by Stelia Aerospace to produce all composite frames in the demonstrator module, as well as being incorporated into an over-molded access door component.

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