Abstract
This work provides a feasibility and effectiveness analysis, through numerical investigation, of metal replacement of primary components with composite material for an executive aircraft wing. In particular, benefits and disadvantages of replacing metal, usually adopted to manufacture this structural component, with composite material are explored. To accomplish this task, a detailed FEM numerical model of the composite aircraft wing was deployed by taking into account process constraints related to Liquid Resin Infusion, which was selected as the preferred manufacturing technique to fabricate the wing. We obtained a geometric and material layup definition for the CFRP components of the wing, which demonstrated that the replacement of the metal elements with composite materials did not affect the structural performance and can guarantee a substantial advantage for the structure in terms of weight reduction when compared to the equivalent metallic configuration, even for existing executive wing configurations.
Highlights
Weight reduction together with the improvement of damage tolerance capabilities have always been the key design aspects in the development of structural components for the aerospace/aeronautical industry.As a consequence of this everlasting challenge, composite materials have been introduced in aerospace applications more than 40 years ago, and aerospace is still the industrial sector where composite are of major practice
The results from the numerical analyses performed on the investigated executive aircraft wing are introduced and commented
The structural integrity was verified by means of numerical linear analysis simulations by performing the following checks: Figure13
Summary
Weight reduction together with the improvement of damage tolerance capabilities have always been the key design aspects in the development of structural components for the aerospace/aeronautical industry. A detailed finite element model was developed, aimed to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of replacing metal components with carbon fibre-reinforced polymers in an executive aircraft wing. This numerical model takes into account the constraints arising from the manufacturing process to support, step by step, the fabrication of the component. Fabrics with more space between fibres are more permeable, and this greatly influences the LRI technology output in terms or rich resin areas With this technology, it is necessary to define the correct layup to be used according to the required mechanical performances, and the manufacturing constraints. The numerical outputs (from linear and buckling analyses), in terms of strains and failure criteria, are verified and discussed together with instability performances of the designed wing with metal components replaced with CFRP
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