Development of innovative technologies for manufacturing of certified narrow body aircraft composite flap

Abstract

Fiber-reinforced polymer composites perfectly meet the basic requirements of aircraft flaps being weight reduction critical for fuel saving and increased payload. New technologies have been designed and developed to increase competitiveness in the use of composite materials by ensuring a continuous manufacturing process, a streamlined and balanced flow of activities, synchronized as much as possible with customer and market demand, reducing material scraps and non-value-added activities.Resin excess, tool mark-offs, out of tolerance dimensions are potential defects generated during the hand lay-up process of the skin manufacturing of composite flap.Innovative technologies for manufacturing of certified narrow body aircraft composite flaps have been designed and developed in order to achieve the best quality of the product and the program ramp-up.Detailed tooling analysis and several simulations, included process flow and bottlenecks detection, have been performed in order to design the new process with high level of automation and reliable devices for human safety and production repeatability, that fully meets the customer’s expectations.